David Ripley (University of Connecticut)

I build a theory of conversational commitment: according to the theory, we are committed to a claim iff denying the claim would be out of bounds, in a certain technical sense. This theory captures some truisms about commitment, and integrates well with a bounds-based meaning theory. This notion of commitment makes available a form of consequence, which I call `commitment consequence'. A claim Q is a commitment consequence of a claim P iff anyone committed to P is also committed to Q. I consider the closely-related notion of `external consequence', as explored in Barrio et al 2014, and argue that commitment consequence captures a phenomenon of greater interest. Nonetheless, given a classical-logic-based conception of the bounds, I show that commitment consequence is very close to the paraconsistent logic LP; this is very similar to one of Barrio et al's results.