Leo, (01)
Yes, I've been working with that material for over 30 years
and trying to synthesize the best of the formal methods
with the lexical methods. (02)
> However, let me remind you of the general state of
> natural language semantics back then: it was a general
> hodge-podge of "my semantic features" vs. "your semantic
> features" and the argumentation was endless. (03)
It wasn't a hodge-podge. Roman Jakobson stood head and
shoulders above the rest, and his contributions have stood
the test of time. When I want to review the critical
"features" in any area, I look at Jakobson's papers from
the '30s to the '60s, which are as fresh as ever. The
features used for phonology today are still based on
Jakobson's original paper on the subject. (04)
As for Montague, et al., I recommend the book by Hao Wang,
_Beyond Analytic Philosophy: Doing Justice to What We Know_,
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1986. (05)
Wang earned his PhD at Harvard with Quine and spent many years
working as an assistant to Kurt Gödel at Princeton. Among his
achievements was the first real theorem prover, which he wrote
in the late '50s using Gentzen's sequents to prove theorems in
propositional logic. (06)
At that time, Newell & Simon had a program that implemented
a proof procedure based on the rules and axioms of the Principia.
It could only prove a few of the simplest propositional theorems,
and on some of them it took over an hour. On the same machine
(an IBM 704, which was about one-sixth the speed of the original
IBM PC), Wang's program proved *every* theorem in propositional
logic in the Principia -- some in a tenth of a second and none
in more than 2 or 3 seconds. (07)
So Wang was no dummy when it comes to logic. Following is what
he had to say about his former thesis adviser: (08)
Quine merrily reduces mind to body, physical objects to (some
of) the place-times, place-times to sets of sets of numbers, and
numbers to sets. Hence, we arrive at a purified ontology which
consists of sets only.... I believe I am not alone in feeling
uncomfortable about these reductions. What common and garden
consequences can we draw from such grand reductions? What
hitherto concealed information do we get from them? Rather than
being overwhelmed by the result, one is inclined to question
the significance of the enterprise itself. (p. 146) (09)
In support of his comments, he quoted a personal letter from
C. I. Lewis, the founder of the modern systems of modal logic: (010)
It is so easy... to get impressive 'results' by replacing the
vaguer concepts which convey real meaning by virtue of common
usage by pseudo precise concepts which are manipulable by
'exact' methods — the trouble being that nobody any longer
knows whether anything actual or of practical import is being
discussed. (p. 116) (011)
That is the point I was making about trying to define "ontology"
as a synonym for "theory". It may be precise, but it throws out
everything "actual or of practical import". (012)
> You can read a number of general intros by Barbara Partee on
> those days, e.g., [2], as we've talked about before. This was
> prior to the rise of model-theoretic methods introduced largely
> by Montague (and building on Kripke, etc.) After Montague, there
> was real advancement in formal NL semantics. (013)
I beg to differ about the value of that work. Just look at one
of the latest textbooks in formal semantics by Chierchia and
McConnel-Ginet. It would have been a great book in 1980, but
after 30 years, they don't show a single sentence that is not
a toy example. It's a nicely written book, but I wouldn't
recommend it to any student as something to emulate. (014)
As for Barbara P., she divorced Emmon Bach and married a Russian
lexical semanticist. She still talks about formal semantics,
but she's more sympathetic to other approaches. Following is
her latest update to that intro: (015)
http://people.umass.edu/partee/docs/BHP_Essay_Feb05.pdf (016)
I'm still in favor of using logic to formalize ontologies, but
I also quote Lord Kelvin: (017)
Better an approximate answer to the right question
than an exact answer to the wrong question. (018)
To quote Wang's subtitle, we have to "do justice to what we know." (019)
John (020)
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