Abstract
Pragmatics plays an important role in correctly understanding sentences. Much useful information will be lost if the context in which a sentence is asserted is ignored. There are some approaches in logic to pragmatics, such as situation theories and context logics. Although these methods associate a sentence with a context or a situation, they consider only the truth value of the sentence. However, a sentence should have more meanings than its truth value, and people care more about what a sentence conveys. For the affection of contexts, the meaning of a sentence is not always its semantic meaning and a sentence may have different pragmatical implications in different contexts. In this paper, a context is considered as some structure in the real world. A sentence from some logical language is conceptualized as a concept, whose intent is a set of sentences implied semantically by the sentence, and whose extent is a set of contexts in which the sentence describes a part of the contexts. In terms of tools and theories of concepts, a strictly defined theory is given to study the pragmatics of sentences in contexts in information systems, which cannot be derived from the sentences by using logical reasoning methods.
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The work is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos.60273019 and 60037017), the National Basic Research 973 Program of China (Grant No.G1999032701), Ministry of Science and Technology (Grant No.2001CCA03000), the NSF of Yunnan Province (Grant No.2004F0017Q) and the Key Project of NSF of Yunnan Province (Grant No.04F00062).
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Sun, Y., Sui, YF. & Xia, YM. Logical Sentences as the Intent of Concepts. J Comput Sci Technol 20, 338–344 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-005-0338-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-005-0338-0