Non-monotonic reasoning in interpretation

The original article of Thomason pursues two goals: first to outline the central logical issues of non-monotonic reasoning, and second to indicate possible applications of nonmonotonic reasoning techniques in linguistics. This appendix will follow up on Thomason’s second goal and show that linguists have taken up his invitation to use nonmonotonic logic as a formal tool. Particularly in the new and very vivid area of formal pragmatics and at the intersection of semantics and cognitive psychology nonmonotonic logics are playing an important role. The paper is structured as follows. The purpose of its first part is to present the recent progress made in formal pragmatics by using nonmonotonic logic to describe pragmatic meaning. We will show how minimal models can be used to describe and explain inferences of language use, in particular Gricean conversational implicatures. After this we will discuss how nonmonotonic logic can be used at the semantic-pragmatic interface to account for the preferred interpretation of a sentence. In the last part of the paper we will discuss the role of nonmonotonic logic for human reasoning in general. Here we will focus in particular on Stenning and van Lambalgen [2008].