Bicategories and the philosophy of language

This paper analyses the arguments of a group of philosophers – Davidson [7, 6], Kim [9], Bennett [1] and Parsons [15] – who have worked on the semantics of actions. They argue that inference patterns involving adverbs require a semantics, formalised in first-order logic, in which actions are first-class individuals. In particular, equalities between actions must be meaningful. (We should note, in passing, that this work is semantically focused, and thus it addresses concerns which are rather orthogonal to the syntactic investigations of, for example, Lambek and his co-authors [4, 3, 11, 12, 10].) The inferences involving adverbs are those of the form