ILLC News & Events

We are looking to fill one postdoc position in Language and Computation within the project EXPRESS: From the Expression of Disagreement to New Foundations for Expressivist Semantics (see Express). This is a five-year project funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant and led by Dr Luca Incurvati (Principal Investigator). The project aims to develop a novel theory and logic of the way disagreement is expressed in dialogue. This theory will then be used to establish a novel approach to natural language semantics, inferential expressivism.

In classical descriptive set theory, Baire space is the most central topological space for the study of the real numbers, consisting of functions from omega to omega. Moving from omega to an uncountable cardinal kappa, one can consider *generalised Baire spaces*, the sets of functions from kappa to kappa. The study of these spaces has become a very important subject in set theory in the past decade.

In combination with the KNAW Academy Colloquium "Generalised Baire Spaces", the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences is offering a one day Master Class on the topic of Generalised Baire Spaces, with four 2-hour courses taught by Andreas Blass, Jouko Vaananen, Andrew Brooke-Taylor, and Philipp Schlicht. This Master Class, intended for graduate students, will teach the basic material needed to understand the research results discussed during the colloquium on the two following days.

The study of generalised Baire spaces has developed into a research area in its own right with a rich overarching theory, internally motivated open questions (cf. Khomskii, Laguzzi, Loewe, Sharankou 2016) and an active research community, combining methods and techniques from several branches of set theory as well as classical model theory. While many concepts from the classical setting can be transferred to generalised Baire space and some classical results remain true at uncountable cardinals, in general the rich combinatorial nature of uncountable cardinals causes the theory of the corresponding spaces to differ significantly, e.g., notions which are equivalent in the classical setting can lead to different notions in the generalised theory. Phenomena like this shed light on structures and properties otherwise hidden in the classical setting.

This Academy Colloquium is a reunion of the research community after a hiatus of two years. The Colloquium will be preceded by an associated KNAW Master Class for postgraduate students in order to prepare them for the talks at the Colloquium.