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CSLI Calendar, April 21, 3:25


       C S L I   C A L E N D A R   O F   P U B L I C   E V E N T S
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21 April 1988                      Stanford                    Vol. 3, No. 25
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     A weekly publication of The Center for the Study of Language and
     Information, Ventura Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
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	     CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR THIS THURSDAY, 21 April 1988

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       Reading: "The Semantics of Clocks"
     Seminar Room  	by Brian Cantwell Smith
			Discussion led by Pat Hayes
			(hayes.pa@xerox.com)
			Abstract in last week's Calendar

   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Cordura Hall	Connections between Linguistics and Computer Science:
     Conference Room	Some Topics in the Mathematics of Language
			Bill Rounds
   			(rounds@csli.stanford.edu)
			Abstract in last week's Calendar
			
   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall
                             --------------
	    CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR NEXT THURSDAY, 28 April 1988

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       Reading: "Constraints, Meaning and Information"
     Seminar Room  	by Ian Pratt, Princeton University
			Discussion led by Keith Devlin
			(devlin@csli.stanford.edu)
			Abstract below

   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Cordura Hall	Types and Tokens in Linguistics
     Conference Room	Sylvain Bromberger
   			(sylvain@csli.stanford.edu)
			Abstract below
			
   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall

			     --------------
			NEXT WEEK'S CSLI TINLUNCH
	     Reading: "Constraints, Meaning and Information"
	      by Ian Pratt, (then at) Princeton University
		     Discussion led by Keith Devlin
		       (devlin@csli.stanford.edu)
				April 28

   The paper claims to establish a fatal flaw in situation semantics as
   developed in "Situations and Attitudes" by Barwise and Perry, arguing
   that the meaning of a declarative sentence, whatever it is, cannot be
   a constraint. As a mathematician trying to help build a theory around
   the ideas developed in S&A, this claim, needless to say, bothers me.
   My own reading of the paper leads me to believe that Pratt bases his
   argument on two basic misreadings of S&A. But maybe I am misreading
   him. I am hoping that the linguists and philosophers at CSLI (but not
   Koll Construction) will be able to help me out and reassure me that
   all is not built on sand.

			     --------------
			NEXT WEEK'S CSLI SEMINAR
		     Types and Tokens in Linguistics
			   Sylvain Bromberger
		       (sylvain@csli.stanford.edu)
				April 28

   This paper takes as its point of departure three widely -- and rightly
   -- accepted truisms: (1) that linguistic theorizing rests on
   information about types, that is, word types, phrase types, sentence
   types, and the like; (2) that linguistics is an empirical science and
   that the information about types on which it rests is empirical
   information, that is, information obtained by attending with ones
   senses to something -- normally tokens (utterances); (3) that the
   facts that linguistics seeks to uncover -- for instance, facts about
   the lexicon or the range of sentences in a given language -- follow,
   in part at least, from facts about people's mental makeup. It (the
   paper) seeks to reconcile (1) with (2) and with (3). Few, if any,
   practitioners feel the need for such a reconciliation, but wide-eyed
   philosophers like me who think (rightly) that types are abstract
   entities, that is, nonspatial, nontemporal, unobservable, causally
   impotent entities, have trouble seeing how information about such
   entities can be obtained by attending to spatial, temporal, observable
   entities, though they cannot deny that it can; and they have even
   greater trouble seeing how features of minds (some misguided souls
   would say brains) can have repercussions in the realm of abstract
   entities.

      The reconciliation proposed in the paper is based on two
   conjectures. First, that tokens of a type (for instance all the
   utterances of `cat', or all the utterances of `Mary sank a ship') form
   what I call a "quasi-natural kind," a grouping like that formed by all
   the samples of a chemical substance (for instance, all the samples of
   mercury). Second, that tokens of different types form what I call
   "categories," a grouping like that formed by the samples of different
   chemical substances (mercury, water, gold, sulfuric acid, etc.). The
   possibility of inferring facts about types from facts about tokens
   follows from these two conjectures like day follows night. And so does
   the conclusion that linguistics is grounded on mental realities.  The
   conjectures, if true, also reveal that the subject matter of
   linguistics, like the subject matter of any natural science, is
   defined by configurations of questions as well as by the makeup of the
   world.

      The paper is an essay in the philosophy of science as it applies
   to linguistics.