Etude sur quelques sémantiques dialogiques

Abstract

The dialogical paradigm provides a theory of meaning alternative to the model-theoretical and proof-theoretical ones which are more widespread. From the dialogical point of view, meaning is given by use within argumentative debates which are designed as two-player games. In this work we present the fundamental notions of the paradigm through the study of various dialogical semantics. We also make some incursions in the metatheory of dialogical games, with among other things a stress on the connection between dialogues and tableaux.Three specificities of our account are: the homogeneous way to ensure finiteness of dialogues with the device of repetition ranks, an explicit formulation of game rules with emphasis on speech acts, and the significant role given to the perspective of extended forms (tree representations) in our analysis.As for results, we propose a new demonstration of soundness and completeness of the tableau method with respect to dialogical games. We also give the first analysis of the dialogical manifestation of the decidability (or not) of a logic as intimately related to the handling with repetition ranks of repetitive behaviours in games.