Formal Semantics

I promised Speranza and the Grice Club that I would return in April to discuss formal semantics, having been distracted from the discussion on that topic which I provoked by referring to Russell Dale's deprecatory chapter on compositional semantics in his 1996 PhD dissertation on "The Theory of Meaning".

http://www.russelldale.com/dissertation/TheTheoryofMeaning.pdf 

I am now engaging again with this topic with the intention of writing something on formal semantics.

At the workshop on "Higher Order Logic and Set theory" the prospect of which distracted me from the discussion of compositionality on the Grice Club, I met a young French philosopher called Isidora Stojanovic, whose principal interest at present seems to be formal semantics, and who has an interesting and relevant collection of papers on line at the Institut Nicod electronic archive, here:

http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/aut/Isidora+Stojanovic/ 

in which (among many other things) she secures my approval by disagreeing with Kripke on the relationship between the a priori and contingency.

These seem for me a valuable and accessible resource which I hope will help me to get an up to date idea of how philosophers are thinking about formal semantics (since my own main sources are non-philosophical), and it will be interesting to see how Isidora's view relates to that of Russell Dale, and of course, here, on how they both relate to Grice's philosophy.

Review of these two sources is not however my principal aim.

My principal aim is to provide a background exposition on formal semantics as a part of an explanation of the method of formalisation by (shallow) "semantic embedding", which I have explored in a number of recent analyses, some provoked by Speranza and Grice.

There are four examples (all in various states of incomplete disarray) which I put on the table, as examples of formal analysis/exegesis making use of mechanised tools (and hence connecting both with Leibniz and Carnap, inter alia).

1. Aristotle's Logic and Metaphysics

This one started with an examination of a formal approach to Aristotle's metaphysics by Grice and Code.

2.Grice on Vacuous Names

This is based on Grice's paper in the Quine volume "Words and Objections" in which he presents his "System Q" (renamed and mangled ever since).

3. Meaning, Modality and Metaphysics

This is an attempt at a critique of both Quine and Kripke on Modal Logic and related topics (provoked by some exchanges on "hist-analytic"). It is in writing this document that I came to feel that I needed a good account of the semantic methods I was using, not just to make them more intelligible to readers but because their philosophical underpinnings are relevant to the subject matter. The document has been suspended pending such an account.

4.Pluralities and Sets

This is a document I wrote in preparation for the workshop of Set theory and Higher Order logic which I just attended at Birkbeck and is a mechanisation of formal materials in a paper of the same name by Oystein Linnebo (who organised the workshop).

I intend now to expand the scope of this paper and retitle it "Iterative Foundational Ontologies" making it into a broader discussion of a subject which I now think of as "the foundations of abstract semantics".

[the "iterative" is as in "the iterative conception of set" which I intend to generalise to other ontologies]

I also have a new empty document which is entitled:

 Formal Semantics and Deductive Methods

(linked for future reference)

And I hope to progress this document, and the one on iterative ontologies while discussing formal semantics at the Grice Club, (and possibly elsewhere) if anyone is still interested!

The next task on my agenda is to respond here to Russell Dale on Compositional Semantics.

Roger Jones