A Study On The Peirce's Puzzle

Charles Sanders Peirce was a famous American philosopher,logician and scientist,one of the founders of modern logic and the founder of pragmatism.The Peirce's Puzzle was a problem of truth inconsistency between corresponding natural language expressions and formal language expressions.Different scholars had analyzed the Peirce's Puzzle in detail and proposed different solutions.The solution of Peirce added the concept of possibility in conditional sentences to solve the truth value inconsistency problem.In the substantial implication solution,Read questioned the truth function of substantial implication conditional sentences and thought that substantial implication conditional sentences had significant defects,and used strict implication to solve the Peirce's Puzzle.In linguistic solutions,it was considered that given a clear category of expressions in natural language,understanding the syntactic construction of natural language sentences became the key to avoid such problems as the Peirce's Puzzle;Conversational implicature theory and dynamic semantics solutions introduced Grice's conversational implicature theory and dynamic semantics into the processing of the Peirce's Puzzle,and influenced the decision of statement truth value through the parameterized processing of speaker,speaker's knowledge reserves and the relationship between utterance and speaker's knowledge reserves.The solution of Peirce and substantial implication solutions introduced necessity into the syntactic description of sentences,and intuitively and formally solved the Peirce's Puzzle,but the description of sentences in this solution was too absolute.From the perspective of linguistics,the linguistic solution interpreted the Peirce's Puzzle by means of logic.Conversational implicature theory and dynamic semantics provided a solution that combines semantics and pragmatics.Starting from Grice's principle and based on the classical interpretation of conditional sentences and constrained pronouns,the intuition generated in the interpretation of the Peirce's Puzzle can be explained.But the linguistic solution and the conversational implicature theory and the dynamic semantics solution focused too much on the linguistic theory itself and ignore the truth value inconsistency between the natural language statements and their logical expressions embodied in the Peirce's Puzzle.The study of the Peirce's Puzzle could not only perfect formal logic and describe natural language accurately,but also had certain significance for the development of substantial implication and strict implication.The integration of the solutions to the Peirce's Puzzle with other disciplines has promoted the development of logic in a wider field.