28.1101, Calls: Semantics / Inquiry / An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (Jrnl)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-1101. Fri Mar 03 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.1101, Calls:  Semantics / Inquiry / An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (Jrnl)

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Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2017 10:52:16
From: David Rey [dareys at gmail.com]
Subject: Semantics / Inquiry / An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (Jrnl)

 
Full Title: Inquiry / An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 


Linguistic Field(s): Semantics 

Call Deadline: 01-Sep-2017 

Inquiry - Special issue on Operators vs Quantifiers

Inquiry invites submissions for a special issue on Operators vs Quantifiers.
We are looking for contributions of at most 8000 words (including footnotes
but not including references). The issue will be guest-edited by Max Kölbel
and David Rey. To submit a paper, please follow the standard procedure for
submitting papers to Inquiry but make sure to select the option ''special
issue Operators vs Quantifiers'' when submitting. For direct queries, please
contact the guest editors at max.kolbel at gmx.com or dareys at gmail.com. Deadline
for submissions: September 1st, 2017.

General theme:

A number of age-old and recent debates in several branches of philosophy
depend in some way on the competition between two apparently different
approaches to modelling linguistic phenomena: on the one hand the approach
that employs binding expressions (e.g. quantifiers) and variables, and on the
other hand the approach that employs intensional operators.
For example, the most standard approach to modality treats expressions like
''possibly'' as intensional operators. A competing approach treats them as
binding quantifiers (''There is a possibility x, such that …x …''). In the
treatment of tense, the situation is reverse: the traditional intensional
treatment of phenomena of tense, as introduced by Prior, is now a minority
view, while a quantificational/referential treatment has become standard.
Analogous alternatives present themselves in the treatment of countless other
embedding expressions that shift some feature: ''somewhere'', ''in some way'',
''on every standard'', ''given what he knows'' etc.

In fact, even ''some'' and ''all'' can be modeled not only as variable-binding
expressions but also as operators, as in an Aristotelian syllogistic or term
logic. Famously, the inventor of logic himself started logic off without
variables, which prompted Geach to complain that Aristotle had started it off
on the wrong foot. An unjustified complaint, as has been shown by many,
including Schönfinkel, Quine and Sommers. The present-day controversy in
semantics between the standard approach and a variable-free semantics à la
Jacobson seems to be the contemporary version of this dispute.

It may be an historical accident that the most mainstream semantic approaches
combine an operator treatment of some phenomena with a quantifier treatment of
other phenomena. Only some extremists argue for a variable-free pure operator
approach (e.g. Jacobson), or for a operator-free pure variable binding
approach (e.g. Schaffer).

It therefore seems worth exploring what exactly is at stake in a choice
between the alternatives: Do we need to employ both operators and quantifiers
in a mixed semantics? If so, are there any principled reasons for deciding
which approach to use in which case? Are there reasons of theoretical
convenience or elegance? If we do not need to employ both, which of the two
purist approaches should we choose?




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