Hamblins zweites Fragen-Postulat aus inferentialistischer Sicht
-
Peter Kügler
Summary
C. L. Hamblin’s second postulate on questions says that ” knowing what counts as an answer is equivalent to knowing the question.“ This assumption has often been adopted by others, yet it is still in need of interpretation. After presenting Hamblin’s postulate in the context of his essay from 1958, and placing it into the context of the two other postulates advocated there, this paper discusses two early suggestions by C. F. Presley as well as the ” set-of-answers methodology“ in formal approaches to the theory of questions. It then develops a pragmatic view based on an inferentialist semantics (Dummett, Brandom), assuming that the propositional content of questions can be identified with their presuppositions. At the end, Hamblin’s postulate survives in a significantly modified form; it only applies to the propositional content of questions, and understanding a question turns out to be a matter of degree.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Iota und Lambda, Sprache und Theorie. Antworten auf Einwände von Sebastian Paasch
- Das mehrsortige axiomatische System MS
- Time and Invariance
- Wieviele moralische Wahrheiten gibt es?
- Hamblins zweites Fragen-Postulat aus inferentialistischer Sicht
- Einstein und die Wissenschaftslehre
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Iota und Lambda, Sprache und Theorie. Antworten auf Einwände von Sebastian Paasch
- Das mehrsortige axiomatische System MS
- Time and Invariance
- Wieviele moralische Wahrheiten gibt es?
- Hamblins zweites Fragen-Postulat aus inferentialistischer Sicht
- Einstein und die Wissenschaftslehre
