Homogeneity, Trivalence, and Embedded Questions

Abstract

Plural predication is known for the homogeneity property: ‘Adam wrote the books’ is true if Adam wrote (roughly) all of the books, but its negation is true only if he wrote (roughly) none of them. Embedded questions show in many ways analogous behaviour: ‘Agatha knows who was at the party’ is intuitively true if Agatha is fully informed about who the guests were, whereas its negation ‘Agatha doesn’t know who was at the party’ conveys that she has pretty much no idea who was there. We argue that the properties of questions in this connection can be explained as a direct consequence of the homogeneity of plural predication once the latter is viewed through the lense of trivalent logic.