Solving Partee’s Temperature Puzzle in an EFL-Ontology

Liefke, Kristina (July 2014): Solving Partee’s Temperature Puzzle in an EFL-Ontology. In: de Paiva, Valeria; Neuper, Walther; Quaresma, Pedro; Retoré, Christian; Moss, Lawrence and Saludes, Jordi (eds.) : Joint Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Natural Language and Computer Science (NLCS’14) & 1st International Workshop on Natural Language Services for Reasoners (NLSR 2014). pp. 7-18

Abstract

According to the received view of type-logical semantics (suggested by Montague and adopted by many of his successors), the number of a semantics' basic types depends proportionally on the syntactic and lexical diversity of the modeled natural language fragment. This paper provides a counterexample to this principle. In particular, it shows that Partee's temperature puzzle – whose solution is commonly taken to require a basic type for indices (for the formation of individual concepts) or for individual concepts – can be interpreted in the poorer type system from [21], which only assumes basic individuals and propositions. We use this result to defend the invariance of formal semantic models under their objects' codings. This result further contributes to the project of identifying the minimal semantic requirements on models for certain linguistic fragments.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
• Faculties: Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Religious Science > Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP); Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Religious Science > Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP) > Logic; Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Religious Science > Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP) > Metaphysics and Philosophy of Language
• Subjects: 100 Philosophy and Psychology > 100 Philosophy; 100 Philosophy and Psychology > 160 Logic
• ISSN: 0874-338X
• Language: English