To represent and reason about contextualized knowledge often two-dimensional Description Logics (DLs) are employed, where one DL is used to describe contexts (or possible worlds) and the other DL is used to describe the objects, i.e. the relational structure of the specific contexts. Previous approaches for DLs of context that combined pairs of DLs resulted in undecidability in those cases wher...

This is a short story of how we have evolved over the last 40 years, doing semantics. It could partially overlap with a history of PACLIC which is commemorating the 25th year or a quarter of a century of its founding. The story tells how we semanticists of natural language moved from all possible worlds to small worlds, now living in and with a tiny mobile world.

Popper’s (1967) ’piecemeal social change’ is an approach manifesting itself in science as critical and emancipatory (C&E) research. It is concerned with incrementally removing manifested inequalities to achieve a ’better’ world. Although design science research in information systems seems to be a prime candidate for such endeavors, respective projects are clearly underrepresented. This positio...

There are four major goals for this paper. First, we demonstrate that the logical foundations of standard approaches to language studies involve an incoherence in their presuppositions. Second, we present an alternative approach that resolves this incoherence. Third, we discuss how this error manifests itself in categorial grammars and model theoretic possible worlds semantics. Fourth, we sugge...

Objects (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), ch. 3.

The question whether material implication is a proper translation of “if ... then ...” in conditional sentences has been known and discussed as “material implication paradox”. The source of this paradox comes from the interpretation of material implication that any falsehood, or contradiction, entails every proposition. For example, consider truth conditions of the conditional sentence (1) and ...

The paper puts forward a theory of historical modalities that is framed in terms of possible continuations rather than possible worlds or histories. The proposal is tested as a semantical theory for a language with historical modalities, tenses, and indexicals.

This paper presents the first possible world semantics for concessive conditionals (i.e., even if A, C conditionals) constructed in a compositional way. First, the meaning of if is formalized through a semantics that builds on the proposal given by Stalnaker [1968]. A major difference from Stalnaker’s approach is that irrelevant conditionals (i.e., conditionals where the antecedent and the cons...

In this paper, we study the logical semantics of actions, preference, and commitment. The semantics is based on the possible world models for dynamic logic of actions. A binary preference relation between possible worlds is associated with the model. Then the preference between actions are determined by comparing that of their consequences. While the preference will influence the agent’s choice...