Preface This book is about semantics and logic. More specifically, it is about the semantics and logic of natural language; and, even more specifically than ...

This paper deals with the truth-Conditions and the logic for vague languages. The use of supervaluations and of classical logic is defended; and other approaches are criticized. The truth-Conditions are extended to a language that contains a definitely-Operator and that is subject to higher order vagueness.

This paper is about the good side of modal logic, the bad side of modal logic, and how hybrid logic takes the good and fixes the bad.In essence, modal logic is a simple formalism for working with relational structures . But modal logic has no mechanism for referring to or reasoning about the individual nodes in such structures, and this lessens its effectiveness as a representation formalism. In their simplest form, hybrid logics are upgraded modal logics in which reference to (...) individual nodes is possible.But hybrid logic is a rather unusual modal upgrade. It pushes one simple idea as far as it will go: represent all information as formulas. This turns out to be the key needed to draw together a surprisingly diverse range of work . Moreover, it displays a number of knowledge representation issues in a new light, notably the importance of sorting. (shrink)

Temporal propositions are mapped to sets of strings that witness (in a precise sense) the propositions over discrete linear Kripke frames. The strings are collected into regular languages to ensure the decidability of entailments given by inclusions between languages. (Various notions of bounded entailment are shown to be expressible as language inclusions.) The languages unwind computations implicit in the logical (and temporal) connectives via a system of finite-state constraints adapted from finite-state morphology. Applications to Hybrid Logic and non-monotonic inertial reasoning (...) are briefly considered. (shrink)

Finite-state methods are applied to determine the consequences of events, represented as strings of sets of fluents. Developed to flesh out events used in natural language semantics, the approach supports reasoning about action in AI, including the frame problem and inertia. Representational and inferential aspects of the approach are explored, centering on conciseness of language, context update and constraint application with bias.

In [HKL00] (henceforth HKL), Hamm, Kamp and van Lambalgen declare ‘‘there is no opposition between formal and cognitive semantics,’’ notwithstanding the realist/mentalist divide. That divide separates two sides Jackendo¤ has (in [Jac96], following Chomsky) labeled E(xternalized)-semantics, relating language to a reality independent of speakers, and I(nternalized)-semantics, revolving around mental representations and thought. Although formal semanticists have (following David Lewis) traditionally leaned towards E-semantics, it is reasonable to apply formal methods also to I-semantics. This point is made clear in HKL via (...) two computational approaches to natural language semantics, Discourse Representation Theory (DRT, [KR93]) and the Event Calculus (EC) presented in [LH05]. In this short note, I wish to raise certain questions about EC that can be traced to the applicability of formal methods to E-semantics and I-semantics alike. These opposing orientations suggest di¤erent notions of time, event and representation. (shrink)