17 June 2026, Ed Zalta: How to Ground Semantics in Higher-Order Metaphysics, Ed Zalta

It is our great pleasure to announce a talk by Ed Zalta (Stanford) taking place at the ILLC. Ed is the creator of the famous Standford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy and well-known for his abstract object theory. He is a very accessible person who loves to talk to students, so this should be a great opportunity for our students. 

Abstract: In this talk, I show how the primitive notions of semantic theories, and the principles stipulated in the semantics to govern these notions, can be systematically defined and derived in object theory (OT). For example, philosophers and logicians have postulated possible worlds, impossible worlds, situations, possibilities, truthmaker states, HYPE states, plural entities, etc. as part of their semantic interpretation of natural language. They also assert axioms that govern these primitive entities. In each case, I show that in object theory, one can define the entities postulated in object-theoretic terms, and then derive the axioms stipulated as theorems of object theory.  I focus particular on the two new examples of this analysis: truthmaker states (Fine) and the possibilities used in possibility semantics (Humberstone, van Benthem, and Holliday).