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This thesis argues for a quantitative, social-cognitive, and experimental approach to pragmatics. A formal decision-theoretic framework is proposed to model language production and interpretation in the context of social cognition. The framework is applied to several case studies: (1) use of refe...
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This thesis develops a semantic account of question embedding. The compositional framework in which this account is formulated is based on inquisitive semantics: it is shown how the inquisitive conception of sentence meaning can be implemented on a type-theoretical level. The resulting framework ...
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The thesis concerns the semantics of proper names in the context of propositional attitude reports. The semantic contribution of names in the scope of attitude verbs famously generates a puzzle, known as Frege~s puzzle. In the thesis, different semantic theories of propositional attitude have bee...
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In a theory of conversations as joint projects, communicative success is established upon uptake of the project, and failure is dealt with through clarification. Founded in a deeper investigation into uptake and clarification, this thesis develops a theory of conversational arguments. I examine t...
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This thesis is concerned with the area of algebraic set theory. Algebraic set theory was invented by Joyal and Moerdijk [18] with the aim to study set theory from the perspective of category theory. The central notion is a category of classes, given by a triple (E, S, P_s ), consisting of a Heyti...
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In this thesis the reader finds a critical discussion of Donald Davidson's conception of truth, and of Davison's claim that a proper understanding of the interrelatedness of meaning, truth, and belief leads to the conclusion that scepticism is unintelligible. Davidson argues that, instead of defi...
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In this thesis we construct a new model of intensional type theory in
the category of cubical sets with connections. To facilitate this we
introduce the notion of a nice path object category, a simplification
of the path object category axioms of v.d. Berg and Garner that
nonetheless yields the f...
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Why can't we be surprised whether it rains in Amsterdam?
A semantics for factive verbs and embedded questions.
Michele Herbstritt
Abstract:
This thesis is about the semantics of embedded questions and question-embedding verbs. In particular, we focus on so-called responsive verbs, i.e. verbs tha...
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As part of the general project of procedural semantics, nearly thirty years ago van Benthem first proposed semantic automata as a computational model of natural language quantification. While automata-theoretic characterization results have been obtained for monadic quantifiers, very little has b...
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This thesis attempts to delineate the contours of a nascent domain of inquiry which shall be known as "philosophy of logical practice" and to make a modest contribution to this field, by way of a case study in formal semantics. Over the past few decades, logic has spawned a lively scientific comm...
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We present two variants of Dynamic Epistemic Logic based on a new formal representation of what it means to know a number.
The Logic of Guessing Games GG formalizes number guessing games and information updates happening in such games. We discuss many examples and provide a sound and complete axi...