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A Pragmatic Analysis of the Pedagogical Implications of the Use of English Epistemic Modality Written Literary Discourse
This is a pragmatic study of the use of the items of epistemic modality in a literary discourse with the main aims to identify, analyze and describe the ways the items of epistemic modality are used. Their contextual meanings, functions, and implication to the pedagogical attempts are also unfolded. The results of the interpretative and descriptive analysis reveal that the items of epistemic modality are found to be very dominant which also suggests that the genre of narrative fiction is linguistically characterized by the utterances that are established on the basis of knowledge and reasoning. The items of epistemic modality are found to be polysemous and polyfunctional which are reflected pragmatically in the forms of politeness, negotiative and constructive functions. All these lead to the acknowledgement that the use of the items of linguistic modality in literary discourse and their usage for language teaching in the applied linguistic contexts is worth conducting
Belief as Willingness to Bet
We investigate modal logics of high probability having two unary modal
operators: an operator expressing probabilistic certainty and an operator
expressing probability exceeding a fixed rational threshold . Identifying knowledge with the former and belief with the latter, we may
think of as the agent's betting threshold, which leads to the motto "belief
is willingness to bet." The logic for has an
modality along with a sub-normal modality that extends
the minimal modal logic by way of four schemes relating
and , one of which is a complex scheme arising out of a theorem due to
Scott. Lenzen was the first to use Scott's theorem to show that a version of
this logic is sound and complete for the probability interpretation. We
reformulate Lenzen's results and present them here in a modern and accessible
form. In addition, we introduce a new epistemic neighborhood semantics that
will be more familiar to modern modal logicians. Using Scott's theorem, we
provide the Lenzen-derivative properties that must be imposed on finite
epistemic neighborhood models so as to guarantee the existence of a probability
measure respecting the neighborhood function in the appropriate way for
threshold . This yields a link between probabilistic and modal
neighborhood semantics that we hope will be of use in future work on modal
logics of qualitative probability. We leave open the question of which
properties must be imposed on finite epistemic neighborhood models so as to
guarantee existence of an appropriate probability measure for thresholds
.Comment: Removed date from v1 to avoid confusion on citation/reference,
otherwise identical to v
Forgetting complex propositions
This paper uses possible-world semantics to model the changes that may occur
in an agent's knowledge as she loses information. This builds on previous work
in which the agent may forget the truth-value of an atomic proposition, to a
more general case where she may forget the truth-value of a propositional
formula. The generalization poses some challenges, since in order to forget
whether a complex proposition is the case, the agent must also lose
information about the propositional atoms that appear in it, and there is no
unambiguous way to go about this.
We resolve this situation by considering expressions of the form
, which quantify over all possible (but
minimal) ways of forgetting whether . Propositional atoms are modified
non-deterministically, although uniformly, in all possible worlds. We then
represent this within action model logic in order to give a sound and complete
axiomatization for a logic with knowledge and forgetting. Finally, some
variants are discussed, such as when an agent forgets (rather than
forgets whether ) and when the modification of atomic facts is done
non-uniformly throughout the model
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