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Newsletter, Dec. 13, No. 8


                       C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
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December 13, 1984               Stanford                      Vol. 2, No. 8
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         A weekly publication of The Center for the Study of Language and 
	 Information, Ventura Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
                           ____________ 

         CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *THIS* THURSDAY, December 13, 1984

12 noon                 TINLunch
  Ventura Hall          ``Syntactic Features, Semantic Filtering,
  Conference Room       and Generative Power''
                        Discussion led by Peter Sells

2:15 p.m.               CSLI Seminar
  Redwood Hall          ``A Generalized Framework for Speech Recognition''
  Room G-19             by Marcia Bush
                        Discussant will be Kris Halvorsen

3:30 p.m.               Tea
  Ventura Hall		

4:15 p.m.               CSLI Colloquium
  Redwood Hall          ``Data Semantics''
  Room G-19             Fred Landman, Department of Philosophy,
                          University of Amsterdam
                        Peter Sells, discussion leader
			    ______________

        *****THURSDAY CSLI ACTIVITIES BETWEEN QUARTERS*****
There will be no center-wide Thursday activites between quarters (on
December 20, 27, and January 3). Regular Thursday activities will resume
on January 10.
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		       NEW REPORTS FROM OVERSEAS

CSLI has received a series of reports from Department of Computer Science,
University of Edinburgh, and ICOT Research Center of Japan. These reports
have been placed in the Reading Room in Ventura Hall for general use.
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                   NEW EDITION OF CSLI REPORT NO. 8

The final edition of Report No. CSLI--84--8, entitled ``Reflection and
Semantics in LISP'' by Brian Smith, has now been published. Copies
of this report may be obtained by writing to Dikran Karagueuzian at CSLI.


Page 2                   CSLI Newsletter                   December 13, 1984
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                          COURSE ANOUNCEMENT     
               Sets and Processes [Math. 294 (Phil. 394)]
	  Provisional time: Winter Quarter, Fridays, 1:15--3:15.

The standard universe of well-founded sets can be completed in a
natural way so as to incorporate every possible non-well-founded set.
The new completed universe will still model all the axioms of set
theory except that the foundation axiom must be replaced by an
anti-foundation axiom.  The first part of the course will be concerned
with this new axiom, its model and its consequences.  Several
interesting variants of the axiom will also be examined.  The second
part of the course will be concerned with an axiomatic approach to a
general notion of abstract sequential process.  These processes are
capable of interacting with each other so that a variety of operations
for their parallel composition will be available.  The notion is
intended to form the foundation for an approach to the semantics of
programming languages involving concurrency.  A model for the axiom
system can be extracted from recent work of Robin Milner.  But by
using the anti-foundation axiom a simple purely set theoretic model
will be given.  Auditors are very welcome.  The course may be of
interest to both mathematicians and computer scientists.    --Peter Aczel
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	         SUMMARY OF LAST WEEK'S NL1 SEMINAR
             ``Three-valued Hintikkian Epistemic Logic''
	    		  By Lauri Carlson

Hintikka's system of epistemic logic in K&B and Models for Modalities
contains a number of peculiar features (restricted range feature,
treatment of irreducible existential formulae) which skew the natural
interpretation of certain formulae and make it hard to ascertain
completeness of the system(s).  For instance the formula (x)(Ey)Kx=y
is valid (and does not mean I "know who everyone is"), while
(Ex)(Ey)(x=y & -Kx=y) is inconsistent (and does not mean "There is
someone who might be two different people as far as I know").  Lauri
Carlson presented a version of epistemic logic which overcomes these
difficulties and can be shown complete with respect to its intended
Kripkean style semantics.

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