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350Does DBS change a patient’s personality? This is one of the central questions in the debate on the ethics of treatment with Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS). At the moment, however, this important debate is hampered by the fact that there is relatively little data available concerning what patients actually experience following DBS treatment. There are a few qualitative studies with patients with Parkinson’s disease and Primary Dystonia and some case reports, but there has been no qualitative study …Read more
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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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51The architecture of meaning : Wittgenstein's tractatus and formal semanticsIn David K. Levy & Edoardo Zamuner (eds.), Wittgenstein’s Enduring Arguments, Routledge. 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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185Dynamic Montague grammarIn L. Kalman (ed.), Proceedings of the Second Symposion on Logic and Language, Budapest, Eotvos Lorand University Press, 1990, pp. 3-48, Eotvos Lorand University Press. pp. 3-48. 1990.In Groenendijk & Stokhof [1989] a system of dynamic predicate logic (DPL) was developed, as a compositional alternative for classical discourse representation theory (DRT ). DPL shares with DRT the restriction of being a first-order system. In the present paper, we are mainly concerned with overcoming this limitation. We shall define a dynamic semantics for a typed language with λ-abstraction which is compatible with the semantics DPL specifies for the language of first-order predicate logic. We…Read more
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288Why Compositionality?In Greg N. Carlson & Francis Jeffry Pelletier (eds.), Reference and Quantification: The Partee Effect, Csli Publications. pp. 83--106. 2005.The paper identifies some background assumptions of compositionality in formal semantics and investigates how they shape formal semantics as a scientific discipline
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2Proceedings of the Eighth Amsterdam Colloquium: December 17-20, 1991Illc, University of Amsterdam. 1992.
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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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569Meaning, InterpretationIn D. Beaver & P. Scotto di Luzio (eds.), Words, Proofs, and Diagrams, Csli Publications. pp. 217-240. 2002.This paper1 explores, quite tentatively, possible consequences for the concept of semantics of two phenomena concerning meaning and interpretation, viz., radical interpretation and normativity of meaning. Both, it will be argued, challenge the way in which meaning is conceived of in semantics and thereby the status of the discipline itself. For several reasons it seems opportune to explore these issues. If one reviews the developments in semantics over the past two decades, one observes that qui…Read more
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163Coreference and modalityIn Shalom Lappin (ed.), The handbook of contemporary semantic theory, Blackwell Reference. pp. 179-216. 1996.Of course, although this view on meaning was the prevailing one for almost a century, many of the people who initiated the enterprise of logical semantics, including people like Frege and Wittgenstein, had an open eye for all that it did not catch. However, the logical means which Frege, Wittgenstein, Russell, and the generation that succeeded them, had at their disposal were those of classical mathematical logic and set-theory, and these indeed are not very suited for an analysis of other aspec…Read more
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129In the present version of these lecture notes only a number of typos and a few glaring mistakes have been corrected. Thanks to Paul Dekker for his help in this respect. No 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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224What Cost Naturalism?In Wiebke Petersen & Kata Balogh (eds.), BRIDGE 2014 Proceedings, University of Duesselfors Press. forthcoming.The paper traces some of the assumptions that have informed conservative naturalism in linguistic theory, critically examines their justification, and proposes a more liberal alternative.
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128Why compositionality?In Greg Carlson & J. Pelletier (eds.), Reference and Quantification: The Partee Effect, Csli Press. pp. 83-106. 2005.The paper identifies some background assumptions of compositionality in formal semantics and investigates how they shape formal semantics as a scientific discipline.
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134The Company of Objects / Het Gezelschap der DingenIn Kasper Tine and Andreasen Melzer (ed.), Inventory, Johan Deumens. 2008.Objects come to us, and we to them, in many different ways: by touch, vision, smell; in thought, language, imagination. We access them directly and manipulate them; or we approach them indirectly and keep our distance. Sometimes we do so at the same time: we pick up an object and ask ourselves where we bought it, or what it is for; we look at an object and admire its shape or colour. But often we simply take the object and use it, and neither its material properties, nor its history need concern …Read more
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94Hand or Hammer? On formal and natural languages in semanticsJournal of Indian Philosophy 35 (5-6): 597-626. 2007.This paper does not deal with the topic of ‘the generosity of artificial languages from an Asian or a comparative perspective’. Rather, it is concerned with a particular case taken from a development in the Western tradition, when in the wake of the rise of formal logic at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century people in philosophy and later in linguistics started to use formal languages in the study of the semantics of natural languages. This undertaking rests on ce…Read more
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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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338Dynamic predicate logicLinguistics and Philosophy 14 (1): 39-100. 1991.This paper is devoted to the formulation and investigation of a dynamic semantic interpretation of the language of first-order predicate logic. The resulting system, which will be referred to as ‘dynamic predicate logic’, is intended as a first step towards a compositional, non-representational theory of discourse semantics. In the last decade, various theories of discourse semantics have emerged within the paradigm of model-theoretic semantics. A common feature of these theories is a tendency to …Read more
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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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125Meaning in motionIn Klaus von Heusinger & Urs Egli (eds.), Reference and Anaphoric Relations, Kluwer. pp. 47-76. 2000.The paper sketches the place of dynamic semantics within a broader picture of developments in philosophical and linguistic theories of meaning. Some basic concepts of dynamic semantics are illustrated by means of a detailed analysis of anaphoric definite and indefinite descriptions, which are treated as contextually dependent quantificational expressions. It is shown how a dynamic view sheds new light on the contextual nature of interpretation, on the difference between monologue and dialogue, a…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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464Effects of Deep Brain Stimulation on the lived experience of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder patientsPLoS ONE 10 (8): 1-29. 2015.Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is a relatively new, experimental treatment for patients suffering from treatment-refractory Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). The effects of treatment are typically assessed with psychopathological scales that measure the amount of symptoms. However, clinical experience indicates that the effects of DBS are not limited to symptoms only: patients for instance report changes in perception, feeling stronger and more confident, and doing things unreflectively. Our ai…Read more
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132This Might Be ItIn Dag Westerstahl & Jeremy Seligman (eds.), Language, Logic, and Computation: the 1994 Moraga Proceedings, Csli. pp. 255--70. 1996.Discussions 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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232The paper by Fritz Hamm, Hans Kamp and Michiel van Lambalgen (in what follows abbreviated as ‘HKL’) is a very rich one. Not only does it contain a wealth of empirical and formal insights concerning the analysis of tense and aspect, planning and causality, and other phenomena, it also contains some penetrating remarks concerning the scope and method of semantic theory. It is the latter aspect of the paper that I want to make a few comments on in what follows.
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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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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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136Interrogatives and Adverbs of QuantificationIn Katalin Bimbó & Andras Maté (eds.), Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium on Logic and Language, Aran Publishers. pp. 1-29. 1993.This 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. The first assumption concerns a very global intuition about the kind of semantic objects that we associate with interrogatives. The intuition is that there is an intimate relationship between interrogatives and their ans…Read more
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155The Role of Artificial LanguagesIn Gillian Russell & Delia Graff Fara (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language, Routledge. pp. 5440553. 2011.When one looks into the role of artificial languages in philosophy of language it seems appropriate to start with making a distinction between philosophy of language proper and formal semantics of natural language. Although the distinction between the two disciplines may not always be easy to make since there arguably exist substantial historical and systematic relationships between the two, it nevertheless pays to keep the two apart, at least initially, since the motivation commonly given for t…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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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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379Semantic analysis of wh-complementsLinguistics and Philosophy 5 (2). 1982.This paper presents an analysis of wh-complements in Montague Grammar. We will be concerned primarily with semantics, though some remarks on syntax are made in Section 4. Questions and wh-comple ments in Montague Grammar have been studied in Hamblin (1976), Bennett (1979), Karttunen (1977) and Hauser (1978) among others. These proposals will not be discussed explicitly, but some differences with Karttunen's analysis will be pointed out along the way
Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Linguistics |
Ludwig Wittgenstein |
Formal Semantics |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
20th Century Philosophy |