The paper deals with hot problems of current semantics that are interconnected with a fundamental question What is the meaning of a natural language expression? Our explication of the meaning is based on the key notion of Tichy’s Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL), namely that of the logical construction, an entity structured from the ‘algorithmic point of view’ (procedure), the structure of w...

Thus, we conclude that a modal like ‘think’ is a necessary ingredient for de re/de dicto ambiguity. Roughly put, the ambiguity of (1) can be understood as follows. In the interpretation where ‘the linguist’ refers to Sue, it is evaluated against what we know, so the referent of ‘the linguist’ is who we know as the unique linguist, i.e. Sue. This is the same for the unembedded sentence in (4). O...

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We show how some model-theoretical devices (local reasoning, modes of presentation, an additional accessibility relation) can be combined in first-order modal logic to formalize the consequence relation that includes de dicto and de re contradictory beliefs. Instead of special " sense objects " , appearances of objects in an agent's belief are introduced and presented as ordered pairs consistin...

In this paper I argue that in addition to the three generally recognized kinds of de re thought, i.e., perception-based, memory-based and communication-based thought, there is a kind of de re thought, which is based on image and cannot be assimilated to any of these recognized kinds of de re thought. I call it simply image-based de re thought. Although image-based thought shares some similariti...

The paper concerns the understanding of plurals in the framework of Artificial Intelligence and emphasizes the role of time. The construction of collection(s) and their evolution across time is often crucial and has to be accounted for. The paper contrasts a"de dicto"collection where the collection can be considered as persisting over these situations even if its members change with a"de re"col...

in terms of de dicto necessity, necessity conceived as a property of propositions or sentences. The heart of Plantinga's theory is his scheme for the reduction of de re modal sentences to equivalent de dicto ones. The idea is to provide an equivalent sentence containing no modal operators within the scope of a quantifier for every sentence asserting that some thing is necessarily or essentially...