This paper uses possible-world semantics to model the changes that may occur in an agent’s knowledge as she loses information. This builds on previous work in which the agent may forget the truth-value of an atomic proposition, to a more general case where she may forget the truth-value of a propositional formula. The generalization poses some challenges, since in order to forget whether a comp...

Dear Hans-Jörg! In the seventies and early eighties we have been colleagues in the ‘Automatentheorie und Formale Sprachen’ group at TU Berlin and shared many interests. Later we departed into different fields of research and followed different directions of thought. It is thirty years now that we have completed our PhD at TU Berlin, and this year is your sixtieth birthday. Since the times at AT...

The event template for a verb is a lexical representation of the type of event that the verb can denote. Manner of motion verbs have a simple template: An entity is engaged in a manner of motion activity (e.g., walk). Change of location verbs have a different template: An entity changes from one location to another (e.g., arrive). We propose, and support empirically, that these templates determ...

This paper discusses some structural conditions under which Russellian propositions in the sense of J. Barwise and J. Etchemendy [2] are paradoxical, and the computational complexity of the problems whether or not Russellian proposition is paradoxical, intrinsically paradoxical, and classical.

This paper is concerned with Wittgenstein’s early doctrine of the independence of elementary propositions. Using the notion of a free generator for a logical calculus—a concept we claim was anticipated by Wittgenstein— we show precisely why certain difficulties associated with his doctrine cannot be overcome. We then show that Russell’s version of logical atomism—with independent particulars in...

Recent work in philosophy of language has raised significant problems for the traditional theory of propositions, engendering serious skepticism about its general workability. These problems are, I believe, tied to fundamental misconceptions about how the theory should be developed. The goal of this paper is to show how to develop the traditional theory in a way which solves the problems and pu...

Recently, Wadler presented a continuation-passing translation from a session-typed functional language, GV, to a process calculus based on classical linear logic, CP. However, this translation is one-way: CP is more expressive than GV. We propose an extension of GV, called HGV, and give translations showing that it is as expressive as CP. The new translations shed light both on the original tra...

This paper concerns itself with the relation between two important semantic notions: the traditional notion of proposition and a more recent notion of context as an information state. The notion of proposition has traditionally played an important role in the theory of meaning: propositions are entities that have independent truth conditions and act as the meaning of both independent and embedd...

Talking even about rather ordinary circumstances appears to implicate directly certain metaphysically loaded identifications. For example, if Dr. Gustav Lauben is a doctor then it seems to follow that he has the property of being a doctor; just as if he is injured, he has the property (or the characteristic) of being injured. Moreover, if Frege should come to believe that the good doctor is inj...