Research in the Cognitive Sciences
These interdisciplinary projects cover a broad range of topics in computer science, linguistics, logic and semantics, philosophy, psychology, and education.

Action, Information, and Cognition
The project on Action, Information, and Cognition is aimed at exploring the foundation of intelligent, information-guided and goal-oriented behavior, as it is exhibited in both natural organisms, such as humans, and artificial agents. The goal of the project is a unified theory of the role of information in intelligent behavior.
David Israel, John Perry, and Syun Tutiya

Business Applications of Situation Theory
The Business Applications of Situation Theory (BAST) project sets out to develop a fundamental understanding of information and a set of conceptual tools and analytic methodologies to manage information efficiently. Much of the work to date has involved the development and application of tools to analyze and organize communications data obtained in the workplace.
Keith Devlin

Dynamic Logic and Information Flow
The project aims at developing a mathematical-logical account of the structure of meaningful information, and its useful transformations in cognition and communication. The emphasis is on two major aspects: dynamics of processes, and the informational complexities of many-person interactions.
Johan van Benthem

Grammatical Complexity
This project studies what leads people to choose one word order over another when both are acceptable. It is known that people tend to place simple phrases before complex ones, and old information before new information; but the relevant notions of complexity and newness have not been made precise, and it is not known what other factors might affect ordering.
Thomas A. Wasow

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
The HPSG project is developing mathematically precise grammars and lexicons of a variety of human languages. Its analyses of English contribute directly to the on-line grammars developed by the LINGO project.
Ivan Sag

Lexical Acquisition in Language Development
The Lexical Acquisition project is studying the kinds of pragmatic information about meaning offered to young children by adults, and also the extent to which children take up this information. One goal is to chart the range of inferences children make and the uses they put them to in the process of acquiring word-meanings.
Eve Clark

Lexical Functional Grammar

Joan Bresnan, Mary Dalrymple, Ron Kaplan, Tracy King, Chris Manning, Peter Sells, plus affiliated student reearchers (to be named)

The Metaphysics Research Lab
In this lab, philosophers at Stanford and elsewhere are collaborating on the development of a formal ontology which systematizes abstract objects of various kinds (such numbers, sets, properties, physically possible objects, etc). Edward N. Zalta at Stanford is collaborating with Bernard Linsky (U. Alberta), Branden Fitelson (U. California/ Berkeley), Hannes Leitgeb (U. Bristol), Otávio Bueno (U. Miami), and Michael Nelson (U. California/Riverside) on papers developing different aspects of this ontology, including a computational component.
Edward Zalta

Spatial Thought and Language
Our research focuses on how people represent the space of the body, the space around the body, the space of navigation, the temporal space of action, the space of depiction. How do people describe those spaces and understand those descriptions?
Barbara Tversky