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47The Architecture of Meaning: Wittgenstein's Tractatus and formal semanticsIn D. K. Levy & Alfonso Zamuner (eds.), Wittgenstein’s Enduring Arguments, Routledge. pp. 211-244. 2008.With a few notable exceptions formal semantics, as it originated from the seminal work of Richard Montague, Donald Davidson, Max Cresswell, David Lewis and others, in the late sixties and early seventies of the previous century, does not consider Wittgenstein as one of its ancestors. That honour is bestowed on Frege, Tarski, Carnap. And so it has been in later developments. Most introductions to the subject will refer to Frege and Tarski (Carnap less frequently) —in addition to the pioneers just…Read more
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46This paper is an informal introduction to some aspects of dynamic semantics. It is a compilation of earlier reports on joint work with Frank Veltman. The opening section can also be found in Groenendijk et al. 1996a. Section 3 is drawn from Groenendijk et al. 1995a. Some of the discussion in section 4 derives from Groenendijk et al. 1996c.
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45World and Life as One: Ethics and Ontology in Wittgenstein’s Early ThoughtStanford University Press. 2002.This book explores in detail the relation between ontology and ethics in the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, notably the _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ and, to a lesser extent, the _Notebooks 1914-1916_. Self-contained and requiring no prior knowledge of Wittgenstein's thought, it is the first book-length argument that his views on ethics decisively shaped his ontological and semantic thought. The book's main thesis is twofold. It argues that the ontological theory of the _Tractatus_ is fun…Read more
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38Tractatus, Application and UseOpen Philosophy 3 (1): 770-797. 2020.The article argues for a contextualised reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. It analyses in detail the role that use and application play in the text and how that supports a conception of transcendentality of logic that allows for contextualisation. The article identifies a tension in the text, between the requirement that sense be determinate and the contextual nature of application, and suggests that it is this tension that is a major driver of Wittgenstein’s later ideas.
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37Studies in discourse representation theory and the theory of generalized quantifiers (edited book)Foris Publications. 1986.Semantic Automata Johan van Ben them. INTRODUCTION An attractive, but never very central idea in modern semantics has been to regard linguistic expressions ...
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34The Quest for PurityCroatian Journal of Philosophy 11 (3): 275-294. 2011.This short note takes another look at the ideas proposed by the ‘New Wittgen steinians’, focusing on a feature of the discussion these ideas have generated that hitherto seems to have received comparatively little attention, viz., certain assumptions about the conception of philosophy as an intellectual enterprise, including its relation to the sciences, that seem to be adopted by both the New Wittgensteinians and (many of) their critics.
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33Truth, interpretation, and information: selected papers from the third Amsterdam colloquium (edited book)Foris Publications. 1984.A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation Hans Kamp. INTRODUCTION Two conceptions of meaning have dominated formal semantics of natural language. ...
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31Het einde van de filosofie?Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 109 (2): 171-198. 2017.The end of philosophy? A Wittgensteinian perspective on the challenge of naturalism The paper addresses the challenges that naturalism poses for the humanities, and for philosophy in particular. After a general overview it takes as its starting point recent discussions on Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy and argues that from Wittgenstein’s work on certainty, aesthetic experience and religious belief a notion of ‘non-discursive content’ can be extracted that may provide a new take on the naturalist…Read more
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29When in 1980, on the Third Amsterdam Colloquium, Johan van Benthem read a paper with the title ‘Why is Semantics What?’ (cf. [1]), I was puzzled: Wasn’t it obvious what semantics is? Why did our concept of it stand in need of justification? Later, much later, I came to appreciate what Van Benthem was doing in this paper (and in some others). Questioning the ‘standard model’, the assumptions on which the working semanticists silently agree, Van Benthem opened up a space of issues to be discussed,…Read more
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24Update semantics1 embodies a radical view on the relation between context and interpretation. The meaning of a sentence is identified with its context change potential, where contexts are identified with information states. The recursive definition of semantic interpretation is stated in terms of a process of updating an information state with a sentence. Meanings of sentences, then, are update functions. In general, these are partial functions, since the possibility to update with a sentence ma…Read more
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22No attempt has been been made to update the original text or to incorporate new insights and approaches. For a more recent overview, see our ‘Questions’ in the Handbook of Logic and Language (edited by Johan van Benthem and Alice ter Meulen, Elsevier, 1997).
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22The gamut of dynamic logicsIn Dov Gabbay & John Woods (eds.), The Handbook of the History of Logic. Volume 6: Logic and Modalities in the Twentieth Century, Elsevier. pp. 499-600. 2006.Dynamic logic, broadly conceived, is the logic that analyses change by decomposing actions into their basic building blocks and by describing the results of performing actions in given states of the world. The actions studied by dynamic logic can be of various kinds: actions on the memory state of a computer, actions of a moving robot in a closed world, interactions between cognitive agents performing given communication protocols, actions that change the common ground between speaker and hearer…Read more
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20The aim of this paper is to argue that update semantics is a natural framework for contextually restricted quantification, and to illustrate its use in the analysis of anaphoric definite descriptions and certain other anaphoric terms.
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19De Tractatus lezen. En waarderenAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 115 (2): 139-152. 2023.Reading the Tractatus. And appreciating it The reception history of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus displays an impressive and persistent diversity. This paper explores possible sources of that diversity and locates them in different takes on the text and its context of origin, and in different perspectives of the readers. This hermeneutics is illustrated by a comparison of two views on the importance of ethics for an understanding of the Tractatus: that of Cora Diamond and the one…Read more
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19Ethics and morality, principles and practiceZeitschrift Für Ethik Und Moralphilosophie 1 (2): 291-304. 2018.The paper addresses the tension in Wittgenstein’s work between an absolute and a more contextual approach to values. It argues that both are relevant, but that from a systematic point of view the contextual perspective has priority. The consequent commitment to a form of moral realism is discussed, and an analogy with normativity in the domain of language is adduced to provide further support.
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17This paper is about a topic in the semantics of interrogatives.1 In what follows a number of assumptions figure at the background which, though intuitively appealing, have not gone unchallenged, and it seems therefore only fair to draw the reader’s attention to them at the outset.
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13Wittgenstein's Tractatus at 100 (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2023.The 100th anniversary of the first publication of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is celebrated by a collection of original papers by well-known experts on various aspects of one of the greatest works of philosophy in the twentieth century.
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13Discussions often end before the issues that started them have been resolved. For example, in the late sixties and early seventies, a hot topic in philosophical logic was the development of an adequate semantics for the language of modal predicate logic. However, the result of this discussion was not one single system that met with general agreement, but a collection of alternative systems, each defended most ably by its proponents.
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12RepliekAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 109 (2): 237-243. 2017.Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.
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8Culturele conventies, zekerheden en kritische reflectieAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 113 (3): 407-412. 2021.Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.
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7Can Natural Language Be Captured in a Formal System?In Sven Ove Hansson & Vincent F. Hendricks (eds.), Introduction to Formal Philosophy, Springer. pp. 273-288. 2012.The question whether natural language can be captured in a formal system has been argued at length, and both a positive and a negative answer has been defended. The paper investigates the main lines of argument for both, and argues that the stalemate that appears to have been reached is an indication that the question itself rests on a wrong conception of the relation between natural languages and formal languages, and hence of the methodological status of formal modelling of natural language.
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3Význam, sémantika, WittgensteinFilosofia. 2018.In the first essay, Stokhof discusses the nature and presuppositions of the formal semantic project as such. He shows that considerations of so-called radical interpretation and the normativity of meaning force us to rethink the relationship between the meaning of a linguistic utterance and its interpretation in a way that is hardly compatible with this project. In the second essay, the author introduces the early Ludwig Wittgenstein as an obvious, if completely neglected, precursor of formal se…Read more
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3Logische Dynamiek: Een InleidingAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 90 (1): 3-25. 1998.
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2QuestionsIn Johan van Benthem & Alice ter Meulen (eds.), Handbook of Logic and Language, Elsevier. 2011.
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2Proceedings of the Eighth Amsterdam Colloquium: December 17-20, 1991Illc, University of Amsterdam. 1992.
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1Proceedings of the Thirteenth Amsterdam Colloquium (edited book)ILLC. 2001.Contains papers presented at the Thirteenth Amsterdam Colloquium in formal semantics, pragmatics and logic, which was held in Amsterdam, December 17-19, 2001.
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1On the Semantics of Questions and the Pragmatics of AnswersIn Fred Landman & Frank Veltman (eds.), Varieties of Formal Semantics: Proceedings of the Fourth Amsterdam Colloquium, Foris. pp. 143--170. 1984.
Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Linguistics |
Ludwig Wittgenstein |
Formal Semantics |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
20th Century Philosophy |