The Connectives

In The Connectives, Lloyd Humberstone examines the semantics and pragmatics ofnatural language sentence connectives (and, or, if, not), giving special attention to their formalbehavior according to proposed logical systems and the degree to which such treatments capture theirintuitive meanings. It will be an essential resource for philosophers, mathematicians, computerscientists, linguists, or any scholar who finds connectives, and the conceptual issues surroundingthem, to be a source of interest.This landmark work offers both general material on sentenceconnectives in formal logic, such as truth-functionality and unique characterization by rules, andinformation on specific connectives (including conjunction and disjunction), considering theirpragmatic and semantic properties in natural language as well as various attempts to simulate thelatter in the formal languages of different systems of propositional logic. Chapters are dividedinto sections, and each section ends with notes and references for material covered in that section.If a section covers numerous topics separately, the notes and references are divided into parts,each with its own topic-indicating heading. When topics are not covered in detail but are relevantto matters under discussion, the notes and references provide pointers to the literature. Readersmay find it useful to browse through a topic of interest and then follow the references within itforward and backward on the topic in question, or those to the extensive literature outsideit.

Lloyd Humberstone is Reader in Philosophy at Monash University, Australia.