Preventing existence

Abstract

We discuss the treatment of prevention statements in both natural language semantics and knowledge representation, with particular regard to existence entailments. First order representations with an explicit existence predicate are shown to not adequately capture the entailments of prevention statements. A linguistic analysis is framed in a higher order intensional logic, employing a Fregean notion of existence as instantiation of a concept. We discuss how this can be mapped to a Cyc style knowledge representation.