some logicians as avicenna, khaja nasir al-din tusi, and dabiran katebi believe that denotation (dilala) is dependent on volition (irada), and as long as there is no volition, there is no denotation. some others like qutb al-din razi completely reject this idea and maintain that denotation merely depends on “knowledge of designation” (al-ilm bi al-wad’). some of methodologicians of jurisprudenc...

Nominal sets are a sets-based first-order denotation for variables in logic and programming. In this paper we extend nominal sets to two-level nominal sets. These preserve much of the behaviour of nominal sets—including notions of variable and abstraction—but they include a denotation for variables and meta-variables. Meta-variables are interpreted as infinite lists of distinct variable symbols...

Theories of semantic scope underspecification can be divided into two types, depending on whether they are based on the notion of satisfaction or on the notion of derivation.1 The central tenet of satisfaction-based theories of scope underspecification is that the relation between a representation SR with fully specified scope relations and a representation UR with underspecified scope relation...

In his classic 1892 paper On sense and denotation [12], Frege first contends that in addition to their denotation (reference, Bedeutung), proper names also have a sense (Sinn) “wherein the mode of presentation [of the denotation] is contained.” Here proper names include common nouns like “the earth” or “Odysseus” and descriptive phrases like “the point of intersection of lines L1 and L2” which ...

Tarskian semantics is called "Tarskian" for historical reasons (Tarski, 1936). A more descriptive name would be "systematic denotational semantics," or SD for short. The method is called "denotational" because it specified the meanings of a notation in terms of what its expressions denote. The method is called "systematic" in hopes that the rules that assign meaning are precise enough to suppor...

There is a sense in which authority control and bibliographic control are coterminous — two sides of the same coin. At the very least, bibliographic control is literally impossible without authority control. Cataloguing cannot exist without standardized access points and authority control is the mechanism by which we achieve the necessary degree of standardization. Cataloguing deals with order,...

In line with the Principle of Uniform Solution, Graham Priest has challenged advocates like myself of the “multiple-meanings” solution to the paradoxes of truth and knowledge, due to the medieval logician Thomas Bradwardine, to extend this account to a similar solution to the paradoxes of denotation, such as Berry’s, König’s and Richard’s. I here rise to this challenge by showing how to adapt B...

The notion of reference as entailment in the common ground provides a uniied framework for the treatment of denotation by names, deenite descriptions, and pronouns, including anaphors. Within this framework, semantic and pragmatic considerations are combined, giving two kinds of proof of denotation, by sense and by reference, for references to individuals which are and aren't already in the com...