Monotonicity under Modals

Everything is disjunctive

Human reasoning of attitude verbs follows logical rules, but also influenced by the contexts in practice. In this project, we study monotonic reasoning under modals. We observe that a tension between monotonicity and free choice effects is created in a modal context, which leads to different puzzles. To provide a formal account, on the one hand, we check the monotonic semantics of modals. On the other hand, we analyze free choice phenomena using the framework of bilateral state-based modal logic (Aloni2022). We expect that this project can give us a new perspective on the impact of logic and conversation on human reasoning.

This is my PhD project, supervised by Maria Aloni and Fenrong Liu.