engleski

Imperative negation and dynamic semantics

The philosophical thesis that is defended in this paper is the thesis that an atomic sentence and its negation belong to the same category. In the case of imperatives, the thesis implies that an imperative and its negation are equipotent with respect to their binding force and layers of informational content. Several influential approaches to imperative semantics are examined (in chronological order) and criticized for being in discordance with the thesis. At the same time, a variant of dynamic semantics is being argued for. In order to reduce complexity, the analysis is focused on three types of information: information about the initial state that is to be acted upon (typically an actual state), information about goal state or the state that is to be brought about, and information about possible states or states entailed (not excluded) by the laws of nature.

negation, imperative logic, dynamic semantics

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