some-antics.com

From now on, I am going to refer to this restaurant as Kabob and Schönfinkel.

emma :: May.01.2008 :: logic, nerdiness :: 1 Comment »

Recently, while searching for Henk Barendregt’s Lambda Calculus bible,

(see the spelling suggestion)

emma :: Apr.25.2008 :: logic :: No Comments »

F. Cardone and J. R. Hindley. History of Lambda-Calculus and Combinatory logic. To appear as a chapter in Volume 5 of the Handbook of the History of Logic.

(h/t to LtU)

emma :: Feb.24.2008 :: logic :: No Comments »

Currently, on Paul Graham’s homepage:

(Arm credit to Mark Eret, apparently.)

(EDIT: Dave commented just a few days ago and left me a link to that picture’s Flickr page. Unfortunately, his comment didn’t make it through the spam filter. Fortunately, I manually looked through the comments marked as spam today while waiting for my students to show up to section and found his comment. Thanks, Dave!)

(Yet another EDIT: More science-inspired tats here.)

emma :: Sep.25.2007 :: logic, nerdiness :: No Comments »

One of the reasons why I abandoned the idea to have the domain restriction as part of the meaning of the quantifier/determiner was because I couldn’t see a way to restrict the x in [[the]]: λP[ιx[P(x)]]. Polly suggested that I try working with the raised version of [[the]], Montague’s et,ett type [[the]]. And I knew that I had thought about this problem before, tried to crack, came up against something tricky and decided to stick with have the domain restrictions being nominal restrictions.

It turns out that all we need is a (generalized) conjunction operator and our good friend geach. My N/RC shift is just this: λP[λQ[P ∏ Q]], where in an ordinary NP like the dog, P would be the set of dogs and Q some other restriction on individuals in that domain. I used ∏ and not ∩ in my rule because it was the easiest way to generalize that rule so that you could get functional domain restrictions as well (as in the woman who he loves who every man invited…is his mother, where the restriction is type ee,t). With this rule, you don’t even have to concern yourself with working with a higher-typed [[the]] (though it turns out that if you geach the type-lift operator and then apply it to e-typed [[the]], you get the higher-typed meaning for free). You just need to geach [[the]] twice and then apply it to the conjunction operator and you’ll get λP[λQ[ιx[P(x) & Q(x)]]]. It turns out that this is the same trick that will get you the domain restriction into quantifiers.

emma :: Aug.17.2007 :: syntax, semantics, logic, linguistics :: 6 Comments »

The webpage for the Computational Semantics course at the LSA Institute (see below) is now up here. The page will be updated with slides for the lectures, as well as assignments. Some of the readings for the course are available here. The Prolog textbook is available here.

emma :: Jul.09.2007 :: semantics, logic, linguistics :: No Comments »

(without really teaching it)

It’s Alligator Eggs!, a logic/puzzle game which uses alligators, their eggs and notions of familial bond and hunger to teach the basics of the (untyped) lambda calculus. I tend to cringe at “edutainment”, but this is just too cutesy to not love.

emma :: May.30.2007 :: misc, logic, nerdiness :: 1 Comment »

By way of a link to a Lambda-the-Ultimate post from Nathan, here’s an interesting paper that attempts to avoid some paradox of Frege’s.

This paper claims that you can allow unrestricted impredicative quantification if you keep careful track of Frege’s sense-reference distinction, and distinguish between predicates and names of predicates. This (if it really works — I haven’t done more than skim the paper yet) would be a different method of using a predicative hierarchy to avoid the paradoxes.

Paul C. Gilmore’s An Intentional Type Theory: Motivation and Cut-Elimination

Disclaimer: I haven’t yet had the time to read the paper, so by “interesting”, I mean that I’m interested in looking at it myself :-P Mostly, this post was to serve as a later reminder for me to read it! And yes, I will indeed post comments & observations when I get around to it.

emma :: Mar.19.2007 :: misc, semantics, logic, philosophy :: 1 Comment »

I second the frustration of Gillian Russell re: finding original works by Richard Montague.  It’s amazing to me that Formal Philosophy… is so hard to get.  And extremely maddening.  (Although, hey!  I can get an electronic copy of it from Springer for $32.  $32?!  It’s a PDF!  Montague is dead!  Who the hell is that money going to?!  Grr, intellectual property laws in academia.)  Thankfully, the library at Brown had a copy, but I’m still shocked that it’s so near-impossible to get your hands on this book.  I mean, the Lambda Calculus was easier to track down, and I originally had to order it from the publishers in the Netherlands (but yay, Amazon!).

emma :: Feb.05.2007 :: semantics, misc, logic, reading, philosophy, linguistics :: No Comments »

From the introduction to Enderton’s “A Mathematical Introduction to Logic”:

This book does not propose to teach the reader how to think. The word ‘logic’ is sometimes used to refer to remedial thinking, but not by us. The reader already knows how to think. Here are some interesting concepts to think about.

emma :: Jan.31.2007 :: logic, reading, philosophy :: No Comments »