For those of you interested in following up on our previous episode, Martin Stokhof has a number of papers on the topics we discussed. On Wittgenstein and formal semantics, you can check out: ‘The Architecture of Meaning: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Formal Semantics,’ Martin Stokhof ‘Formal Semantics and Wittgenstein: An Alternative,’ Martin Stokhof On the distinction between abstraction and idealization, see: ‘Abstractions and Idealisations: The Construction of Modern Linguistics,’ Martin Stokhof & Michiel van Lambalgen...

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Subscribe to Elucidations:       Note: there is a problem with Acast’s backend, preventing their player from being able to play this episode, and also breaking the link on our RSS feed. To tide yourself over until Acast’s engineering team are able to fix it, you can download a backup copy of episode 52 here and you can also listen to it by pressing the play button here:...

In Elucidations Episode 51, Groenendijk and Roelofsen sketch out some of the merits of the inquisitive semantics approach to questions in contrast to the ‘classical’ semantic approach. One stark area of contrast is with respect to conditional questions—questions like: “If Matt drinks coffee, does Phil drink coffee?” Groenedijk and Roelofsen observe that the classic semantic approach to questions cannot easily accommodate these conditional questions. In this post, I’d like to flesh out this observation just a bit more....

There really is a lot of exciting work being done right now using the framework of inquisitive semantics. If you’d like to browse through it all, a great place to start is the inquisitive semantics website. Matt Teichman...

If you’d like to take a look how the inquisitive semantic framework is set up, this is an up-to-date overview: Ciardelli, Groenendijk, and Roelofsen, ‘Inquisitive Semantics: a New Notion of Meaning‘ And if you’d like to examine the framework in a little more detail, this paper will probably answer all of your burning questions: Ciardelli, Groenendijk, and Roelofsen, ‘Inquisitive Semantics: NASSLI 2012 Lecture Notes‘ Matt Teichman...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we get a little bit meta and ask our distinguished guests some questions about questions. Or at least about the semantics of questions. Jeroen Groenendijk is Professor of Philosophy of Language and Floris Roelofsen is Assistant Professor of Logic and Semantics at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation in Amsterdam....

Toward the end of his interview on Elucidations, Greg Salmieri [S.] argues against Aristotle’s view that some of our life-activities are intrinsically valuable apart from the whole they constitute, in order to make room for valuing productive work alongside the candidates Aristotle himself prefers. This raises a question about Aristotle and a worry about S.’s own view. The question is this: what was Aristotle’s criterion for distinguishing the intrinsically valuable activities from the rest?...

In this post, I would like to propose an elaboration of Salmieri’s (Episode 50) discussion of instrumental and constitutive means, and his suggestion of a holistic approach to the evaluation of activities (the ‘holistic view of life’). In particular, I will suggest one way in which we can see a blurring of the distinction of instrumental and constitutive means as leading us to the holistic picture that Salmieri sketches in the episode....