Brussels, Belgium
March 14-15, 2013
Honouring Paul Gochet
Program to be posted...
ABSTRACT:
On the character of temporal indexicals
Patrick Blackburn
University of Roskilde
Denmark
In this talk (which is based on joint work with Klaus Frovin Jørgensen) I re-examine early work on the semantics of temporal indexicals through the lens of modern hybrid logic. Modern hybrid logic is a natural tool for handling many varieties of temporal reference, and as I shall show, this suitability extends even to temporal indexicals such as Now, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.
The key idea is to return to the classic work of Hans Kamp and David Kaplan on this topic. However, instead of exploiting their two-dimensional semantics using additional modalities, we make use of character-encoding propositional symbols instead. One of these symbols (namely Now) turns out to work much like an ordinary nominal, and this enables us to unlock the logic of indexicality in an extremely general way.
I won't be assuming much knowledge of logic or linguistics in this talk. Rather my aim will be to present a clear overview of the issues involved and to explain in accessible terms how hybrid logic gives us simple solutions to some rather tricky issues.
March 14-15, 2013
Honouring Paul Gochet
Program to be posted...
ABSTRACT:
On the character of temporal indexicals
Patrick Blackburn
University of Roskilde
Denmark
In this talk (which is based on joint work with Klaus Frovin Jørgensen) I re-examine early work on the semantics of temporal indexicals through the lens of modern hybrid logic. Modern hybrid logic is a natural tool for handling many varieties of temporal reference, and as I shall show, this suitability extends even to temporal indexicals such as Now, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.
The key idea is to return to the classic work of Hans Kamp and David Kaplan on this topic. However, instead of exploiting their two-dimensional semantics using additional modalities, we make use of character-encoding propositional symbols instead. One of these symbols (namely Now) turns out to work much like an ordinary nominal, and this enables us to unlock the logic of indexicality in an extremely general way.
I won't be assuming much knowledge of logic or linguistics in this talk. Rather my aim will be to present a clear overview of the issues involved and to explain in accessible terms how hybrid logic gives us simple solutions to some rather tricky issues.
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