We met Jacques Rancière on Saturday, May 27, 2017, at the School of Fine Arts shortly before his speech at the B-Fest 6 International Anti-Authoritarian Festival, organized by Babylonia Journal, with a central slogan “We are ungovernable”. Rancière is among the most important European philosophers alive and his work does not need further introductions. In the cloudy morning of Sunday 28 May, we sat beneath the Acropolis to have a coffee with the philosopher. The transcript of our conversation reflects the (...) vigor of thought and the passion of a truly democratic thinker. (shrink)

The paper shows how ideas that explain the sense of an expression as a method or algorithm for finding its reference, preshadowed in Frege’s dictum that sense is the way in which a referent is given, can be formalized on the basis of the ideas in Thomason (1980). To this end, the function that sends propositions to truth values or sets of possible worlds in Thomason (1980) must be replaced by a relation and the meaning postulates governing the behaviour of (...) this relation must be given in the form of a logic program. The resulting system does not only throw light on the properties of sense and their relation to computation, but also shows circular behaviour if some ingredients of the Liar Paradox are added. The connection is natural, as algorithms can be inherently circular and the Liar is explained as expressing one of those. Many ideas in the present paper are closely related to those in Moschovakis (1994), but receive a considerably lighter formalization. (shrink)

We introduce the notions of syntactic synonymy and referential syn- onymy due to Moschovakis. Those notions are capable of accounting for fine- grained aspects of the meaning of linguistic expressions, by formalizing the Fregean distinction between sense and denotation. We integrate Moschovakis’s theory with the theory of concepts developed in the foundational ontology DOLCE, in order to enable a formal treatment of equivalence between concepts.