Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Reasoning with Ambiguity Christian Wurm the date of receipt and acceptance should be inserted later Abstract We treat the problem of reasoning with ambiguous propositions. Even though ambiguity is obviously problematic for reasoning, it is no less ob- vious that ambiguous propositions entail other propositions (both ambiguous and unambiguous), and are entailed by other propositions. This article gives a formal analysis of the underlying mechanisms, both from an algebraic and a logical point of view. The main result can be summarized as follows: sound (and complete) reasoning with ambiguity requires a distinction between equivalence on the one and congruence on the other side: the fact that α entails β does not imply β can be substituted for α in all contexts preserving truth. With- out this distinction, we will always run into paradoxical results. We present the (cut-free) sequent calculus ALcf , which we conjecture implements sound and complete propositional reasoning with ambiguity, and provide it with a language-theoretic semantics, where letters represent unambiguous meanings and concatenation represents ambiguity. Keywords Ambiguity, reasoning, proof theory, algebra, Computational Linguistics Acknowledgements Thanks to Timm Lichte, Roland Eibers, Roussanka Loukanova and Gerhard Schurz for helpful discussions; also I want to thank two anonymous reviewers for their many excellent remarks! 1 Introduction This article gives an extensive treatment of reasoning with ambiguity, more precisely with ambiguous propositions. We approach the problem from an Universit¨atD¨usseldorf,Germany Universit¨atsstr.1 40225 D¨usseldorf Germany E-mail:
[email protected] 2 Christian Wurm algebraic and a logical perspective and show some interesting surprising results on both ends, which lead up to some interesting philosophical questions, which we address in a preliminary fashion.