A Resolution Calculus for Presuppositions

The semantics of everyday language and the semanticsof its naive translation into classical first-order language consider-ably differ. An important discrepancy that is addressed in this paperis about the implicit assumption what exists. For instance, in thecase of universal quantification natural language uses restrictions andpresupposes that these restrictions are non-empty, while in classi-cal logic it is only assumed that the whole universe is non-empty.On the other hand, all constants mentioned in classical logic arepresupposed to exist, while it makes no problems to speak about hy-pothetical objects in everyday language. These problems have beendiscussed in philosophical logic and some adequate many-valuedlogics were developed to model these phenomena much better thanclassical first-order logic can do. An adequate calculus, however, hasnot yet been given. Recent years have seen a thorough investigationof the framework of many-valued truth-functional logics. UnfortuADnately, restricted quantifications are not truth-functional, hence theydo not fit the framework directly. We solve this problem by applyingrecent methods from sorted logics