Re: Contexts and quantifiers in KIF
Jim Fulton <jfulton@atc.boeing.com>
Reply-To: cg@cs.umn.edu
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 93 09:35:10 -0700
From: Jim Fulton <jfulton@atc.boeing.com>
Message-id: <9304131635.AA10746@atc.boeing.com>
To: cg@cs.umn.edu, interlingua@ISI.EDU, sowa@turing.pacss.binghamton.edu,
srkb@ISI.EDU
Subject: Re: Contexts and quantifiers in KIF
Cc: jfulton@atc.boeing.com
John,
Got your message. Two points:
1. Montague is only one of many philosophers/linguists/logicians working in
this area, albeit one of the most prominent. I cannot give you alternative
references since I've been out of that fray for the last 16 years. My
inclination is that more is to be gained by focusing on the similarities
among Montague and Kripke on the one hand and Barwise et al on the other,
than by focusing on the differences.
2. I do not think there is any Grand Unification Theory for language that
will be able to deduce from general semantic theory plus specific syntax, even
given specific behavioral context, the meaning of an expression. Such a
theory might provide insights that will focus the unification process more
precisely than without it, but that process will always involve having the
interested parties sitting down to work out the similarities and differences
among the predicates they use to describe overlapping phenomena. I can find
no significant differences between this process and the process of formalizing
a fragment of natural language that has been applied to that phenomena. The
result of the process is an agreement to communicate in a language that has
been formalized, and the Tarskian model, extended in some way that learns
>From both modal logic and situation theory, seems to offer significant power
in describing the semantics of that formalization.
Jim