While holism and atomism are often treated as mutually exclusive approaches to semantic theory, the apparent tension between the two usually results from running together distinct levels of semantic explanation. In particular, there is no reason why one can’t combine an atomistic conception of what the semantic values of our words are (one’s “descriptive semantics”), with a holistic explanation...

This thesis is about exploring the possibilities of a limited version of Martin-L of's type theory. This exploration consists both of metatheoretical considerations and of the actual use of that version of type theory to prove Higman's lemma. The thesis is organized in two papers, one in which type theory itself is studied and one in which it is used to prove Higman's lemma. In the rst paper, ...

Semantic externalism in contemporary philosophy of language typically – and often tacitly – combines two supervenience claims about idiolectical meaning (i.e., meaning in the language system of an individual speaker). The first claim is that the meaning of a word in a speaker’s idiolect may vary without any variation in her intrinsic, physical properties. The second is that the meaning of a wor...

In this paper we argue that compositionality alone isn't sufficient to derive systematicity clauses for meanings (meaning = truth-functional content of an utterance). In a seminal paper by Fodor & Pylyshyn (1988) the 'systematicity' of adjectival modification has been derived from the stipulation that the syntactic operation of modification relates to the semantic operation of conjunction. We a...

This paper is concerned with Wittgenstein’s early doctrine of the independence of elementary propositions. Using the notion of a free generator for a logical calculus—a concept we claim was anticipated by Wittgenstein— we show precisely why certain difficulties associated with his doctrine cannot be overcome. We then show that Russell’s version of logical atomism—with independent particulars in...

The basic realist claim is that a mind-independent reality exists. It should be common sense knowledge to accept this claim, just as any theories that try to deny it soon become inconsistent because reality strikes back. In spite of this, antirealist philosophies flourish, not only in philosophy but also in the behavioral and cognitive sciences and in information science. This is highly problem...

The paper tries to build a bridge between results in commonsense reasoning and inferential theories of meaning. We focus on the problem of communication and the contrast between two views of communication, the “expressive” view and the “convergence” view. According to the convergence view (and local holism which supports it) the meaning of a sentence is the set of inferences to which speakers c...

The core of any document retrieval system is a mechanism that ranks the documents in a large collection in order of the likelihood with which they match the preferences of any person who interacts with the system. Given a broader interpretation of “recommending” than is commonly accepted, such a preference ordering may be viewed as a recommendation, made by the system to the information-seeker,...

This paper looks at the epistemological foundations of knowledge representations embodied in retrieval languages. It considers questions such as the validity of knowledge representations and their effectiveness for the purposes of retrieval and automation. The knowledge representations it considers are derived from three theories of meaning that have dominated twentieth-century philosophy. The ...

In recent years, even some of its own practitioners have accused analytic philosophy of lacking historical awareness. My aim is to show that analytic philosophy and history are not such a mismatch after all. Against the objection that analytic philosophers have unduly ignored the past I argue that for the most part they only resist strong versions of historicism, and for good reasons. The histo...