Interrogative Inquiry as Defeasible Reasoning

Abstract

This paper presents an account of interrogative inquiry based on defeasible inference rules. With any such account, the main issue is the proper identification of the class of conclusions that are warranted on the basis of a set of such rules. In particular, the main formal features that any such account needs to satisfy are identified, and two different approaches are presented, the second one of which satisfactorily meets all desired properties. The approach is based on the author’s previous work on defeasible logics.