Posts

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. Click here to listen to our conversation. ...

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? The answer lies in the function argument of Nicomachean Ethics I.7. Aristotle argues there (to a first approximation) that our activities have intrinsic value when they express our characteristic nature, which is rational. So the intrinsically valuable activities just are the essentially rational activities, among which are contemplation and exercising practical wisdom. These are then the candidates for the governing activity of a happy human life. ...

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. This post should not be taken as a definitive interpretation of Salmieri—I will not contend that he would necessarily adopt my elaboration—but it will hopefully help listeners to think about the connection between the discussion instrumental and constitutive means in the middle of the episode, and the reconceptualization of productive activity that Salmieri advocates at its conclusion. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month it is our pleasure to discuss Aristotle’s ethics with Greg Salmieri, Visiting Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Boston University. Click here to listen to our conversation. Aristotle was somewhat ambivalent about the activity of craftsmanship: i.e. the activity of making things like shoes, clothes, or pottery. On the one hand, he had great respect for it, and of course acknowledged that it was something that needed to be done. But on the other, he thought it wasn’t the best possible way you could spend your time. The best possible life you could live, according to Aristotle, would be one in which philosophical contemplation played a central role. In the ancient world, looking at craftsmanship as something which had to be done, but wasn’t the best possible thing you could be doing, led to a society stratified into two classes: the slaves and the leisure class. Effectively, the people who had the social standing to do nothing but contemplate the truths of the universe all day farmed the activity of making things off to others. ...

For a well-written survey of discourse representation theory and its many applications, take a look at Beaver and Geurts’ Stanford Encyclopedia article: Bart Geurts and David Beaver, Discourse Representation Theory Matt Teichman ...

Hans Kamp has generously provided his paper, ‘The Time Of My Life,’ for us to make available on the blog. Give it a read and tell us what you think! Matt Teichman ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       This month, we talk dynamic semantics with Hans Kamp, Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Natural Language Processing in Stuttgart. Click here to listen to our conversation. The goal of formal semantics is to explain how the meaning of a whole sentence is derived from the words that make it up and the way they’re put together. Give me some definitions of individual words, tell me the order in which they were combined, and by means of a mechanical algorithm, my theory will predict what the resulting sentence means. ...