Semantics etc.

There is a connection between two recent postings that might not be obvious.

• In their essay on women in math, engineering and science, the presidents of Stanford, MIT, and Princeton issue this call:

“Colleges and universities must develop a culture, as well as specific policies, that enable women with children to strike a sustainable balance between workplace and home. Of course, achieving such a balance is a challenge in many highly demanding careers. As a society we must develop methods for assessing productivity and potential that take into account the long-term potential of an individual and encourage greater harmony between the cycle of work and the cycle of life — so that both women and men may better excel in the careers of their choice.”

• In the article on academic free agents, a university administrator is quoted as saying that “getting an outside offer is the best way to increase your salary”. This certainly is what one gets told by Deans and department heads in my experience.

I would like to point out that there is a fundamental unfriendliness to families in a system of salary determination that depends largely on outside offers to gauge the level at which a faculty member should be paid. It seems obvious that faculty members with families, and especially those where the spouse is working as well [Fn. 1], are much more rooted in their community. Kids go to schools, have friends, parents have support networks — all factors that make moving a very difficult proposition.

Such faculty members (who “come with a family”) are naturally seen as “unmovable” by their peers and thus may never be seen as on the market for a possible senior offer.

Why not play the game and solicit outside offers that one does not have any intention of accepting, purely for the purpose to have an argument for a higher salary? Well, to me it seems morally dubious. Especially in small fields where everybody knows everybody, one would be manipulating friends for personal gain.

I recognize that universities need criteria by which to judge the standing of their faculty members so as to determine an appropriate salary level. But the existing system appears fundamentally unfair to faculty members with families and should be revisited if universities really want to “develop a culture, as well as specific policies, that enable women with children to strike a sustainable balance between workplace and home.”

I wonder what could replace the current system? One would hope that something short of a Gourmet Report-like ranking of individual faculty at research universities could be found.

[1]: which by the way means that the issue doesn’t just affect female professors but also male professors whose wives are trying to excel in the career of their choice.

Update: There is a post on “Bitch Ph.D.” about the problem of uprootedness at earlier stages of academic careers.

[via the Leiter Reports]:

“Free Agents, Playing the Field — Hiring System Puts Stars in Classroom but Frustrates Some Faculty”, an article in the Columbia Spectator about faculty salaries and the fact that at many institutions the only way to get a raise is to play games with outside offers, which for those of us who are rooted in one place results in inequities.

The system “discriminates against those who are most loyal to Columbia,” Foner said. “There is an incredibly wide range of salaries, which is very unfair.”

“It is true that getting an outside offer is the best way to increase your salary,” said Provost Alan Brinkley.

The third problem set is due next Wednesday 3/2 at 12 noon.

These are simple exercises in propositional logic from the Partee et.al. chapters on propositional logic that were handed out a couple of weeks ago.

• Exercise 1 on p. 128-9 of Partee et.al.
• Exercise 4 on p. 130 of Partee et.al.

Chris Potts has two new works on his home page:

1. “Lexicalized intonational meaning”. Invited presentation at the Workshop on the (In)-Determinacy of Meaning, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, February 23, 2005. 2up handout; associated UMOP 30 paper

2. “The narrowing acquisition path: From declarative to expressive small clauses.” [Christopher Potts and Thomas Roeper.] Paper presented at the Workshop on the (In)-Determinacy of Meaning, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, February 25, 2005. 2up handout

NB: I’ll be at the same workshop, giving a talk on epistemic might (work I’m doing together with Thony Gillies).

The final exam for 24.903/24.933 will take place in Room 32-144 (Stata Center) on Monday, May 16, 9:00 AM — 12:00 NOON.

Paul Saka, University of Houston: “The Argument From Ignorance Against Truth-Conditional Semantics”

According to epistemic versions of truth-conditional semantics, to know the meaning of a sentence is to know its truth - conditions. Against such views I argue that we typically do not know the truth - conditions of the sentences we understand. We do not know the truth - conditions for vacuous-reference definite descriptions, non-declaratives, subjunctive conditionals, causal ascriptions, belief ascriptions, probability statements, figurative language, category mistakes, normative judgments, or vague statements. Appealing to tacit knowledge does not help, for we are not merely unable to articulate complete truth - conditions; even given full knowledge of a single world condition, we are often unable to tell whether a given sentence would be true or false. This makes it hard to say that knowledge of meaning is even tacit knowledge of truth - conditions.

[via Online Papers in Philosophy — thanks Brian!]

My preferences in order for the format of homework submissions:

1. pdf file attached to email
2. plain text in email
3. Word file attached to email
4. hard copy print out
5. handwritten hard copy

Please try to humor me by choosing a format high on my list.

A series of blog posts on fiction semantics:

• Fake Barn Country: Truth in Fiction and Possible Worlds
• E.G.: Truth in Fiction
• E.G.: Truth in Fiction (part II)
• Philosophy, et cetera: Complete Fiction, inside and out

This semester, I again started my advanced semantics class with an introduction to intensional semantics using the fiction operator in the world of Sherlock Holmes. So, these posts come at the right time. I’ll just have to find the time to read them. I’ll definitely tell my students to check them out.

Just a heads up. As you can see from the course calendar in the syllabus, the next week and a bit will be different.

1. Monday 2/21 is a holiday, so there are no MIT classes.

2. Tuesday 2/22 is when MIT is following the Monday class schedule. So, we will meet on Tuesday at 12 in the usual room.

3. Wednesday 2/23, there will be no class. Instead, you should re-read chapters 1 and 11 from the textbook and the material on propositional logic that was handed out. You should review your notes and go over the first two problem sets. Write down all your questions about the material.

4. Friday 2/25, there will be class — usual time, usual room — which will be a review session, to which you should bring all the questions you compiled. If there are questions remaining after the session, you should email them to fintel@mit.edu and jfitzpat@mit.edu, so that we can get back to you in some form or other.

5. Monday 2/28, there will be no class. This will give you extra time to work on Problem Set #3.

6. Wednesday 3/2, we will resume our regularly scheduled programming.

7. Problem Set #3 will be assigned on Tuesday 2/22 and will be due on Wednesday 3/2.

Chapter 3 of the lecture notes on modals is now available.

Chapter 2 of the lecture notes on attitudes is now available.

I strongly recommend that you read the following paper, which will give you an invaluable overview of the history of natural language semantics.

Barbara Partee: 2005. “Reflections of a Formal Semanticist as of Feb 2005″. ms.

This essay is a longer version of the introductory essay in (Partee 2004). The introductory essay was first written in this long form in February 2003, but had to be cut down to about half the size to fit in the book. By agreement with the publisher, I have waited until a year after the publication of the book, actually thirteen months, until February 2005, before putting the long version onto the internet. I have made a few revisions in 2005, partly in response to comments to the published version which I received from Paul Postal, Jeff Pelletier, and Larry Horn, for which I thank them.

I’ve given this version this peculiar date-including title both to distinguish it from the original published version and because it may be further revised in the future. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Time to curl up with your laptop for a fascinating read.

Barbara Partee: 2005. “Reflections of a Formal Semanticist as of Feb 2005″. ms.

This essay is a longer version of the introductory essay in (Partee 2004). The introductory essay was first written in this long form in February 2003, but had to be cut down to about half the size to fit in the book. By agreement with the publisher, I have waited until a year after the publication of the book, actually thirteen months, until February 2005, before putting the long version onto the internet. I have made a few revisions in 2005, partly in response to comments to the published version which I received from Paul Postal, Jeff Pelletier, and Larry Horn, for which I thank them.

I’ve given this version this peculiar date-including title both to distinguish it from the original published version and because it may be further revised in the future. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Laurence R. Horn: 2005. “Airport ‘86 Revisited: Toward a unified indefinite any“. to appear in G. Carlson & F. J. Pelletier (eds.), The Partee Effect. Stanford: CSLI, 2005.

Awaiting a flight at Boston’s Logan Airport on September 2, 1986, Barbara Partee jotted down some thoughts on the age-old question “Is there a way to unify negative polarity any and free choice any?” Reflecting on the relation of the two any’s to the distribution of almost, Fauconnier (1975) superlatives, comparatives and equatives, she asked semi-rhetorically:

“[I]s it possible that both any’s are instances of a single any which has an interpretation something like a minimal existential, and/or like an ‘arbitrary’ existential (here I’m searching for a way to unify ‘minimal’ as ‘arbitrarily small’ and ‘free choice’ as ‘arbitrarily selected’), and the differences in the constructions derive from the differences in the implicature-generated scales that go upward from or downward to this arbitrarily chosen or arbitrarily small existential point?” (Partee 1986: 3/2003: 236-37)

As suggested by the form of her question and by work subsequent to and partially inspired by the Airport Squib, such a unified approach is as possible as it is desirable. But how do we get one?

Laurence R. Horn: 2005. The Border Wars: a neo-Gricean perspective. In K. Turner & K. von Heusinger (eds.), Where Semantics Meets Pragmatics. Elsevier, 2005.

In reports filed from several fronts in the semantics/pragmatics border wars, I seek to bolster the loyalist (neo-)Gricean forces against various recent revisionist sorties, including (but not limited to) the relevance-theoretic view on which the maxims (or more specifically their sole surviving descendant, the principle of relevance) inform truth-conditional content through the determination of “explicatures”, Levinson’s defense of implicatures serving as input to logical form, recent arguments by Mira Ariel for a semantic treatment of the upper bound (’not all’) for propositions of the form Most F are G, and Chierchia’s proposal to reanalyze implicatures as part of compositional semantics. I argue for drawing the semantics/pragmatics boundary in a relatively traditional way, maintaining a constrained characterization of what is said, while adopting a variant of Kent Bach’s position on “impliciture” and supporting the Gricean conception of implicature as an aspect of speaker meaning, as opposed to its reconstruction in terms of default inference or utterance interpretation. I survey current controversies concerning the meaning and acquisition of disjunction and other scalar operators, the relation of subcontrariety and its implications for lexicalization, the nature of polarity licensing, and the innateness controversy. In each case, I seek to emphasize the significance of the generalizations that a (neo-)classical pragmatic approach enables us to capture.

Barbara H. Partee: 2005. “A Note on Mandarin Possessives, Demonstratives, and Definiteness”. In Drawing the Boundaries of Meaning: Neo-Gricean Studies in Pragmatics and Semantics in Honor of Laurence R. Horn, eds. Gregory Ward and Betty Birner. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

This paper begins from some difficulties in trying to capture in English a range of contrasting examples of possessive phrases in Mandarin. From there we will be led to a re-examination of the interpretation of certain English definite expressions and more generally to the interpretation of definiteness.

[I am printing the entirety of an essay published today, written by the presidents of Stanford, MIT, and Princeton on the topic of women in science. Essential reading.]

Women in math, engineering and science: Drawing on our country’s entire talent pool

February 12, 2005

BY JOHN HENNESSY, SUSAN HOCKFIELD AND SHIRLEY TILGHMAN

Harvard President Lawrence Summers’ recent comments about possible causes of the under-representation of women in science and engineering have generated extensive debate and discussion-much of which has had the untoward effect of shifting the focus of the debate to history rather than to the future.

The question we must ask as a society is not “can women excel in math, science and engineering?”–Marie Curie exploded that myth a century ago–but “how can we encourage more women with exceptional abilities to pursue careers in these fields?” Extensive research on the abilities and representation of males and females in science and mathematics has identified the need to address important cultural and societal factors. Speculation that “innate differences” may be a significant cause of under-representation by women in science and engineering may rejuvenate old myths and reinforce negative stereotypes and biases.

Why is this so important? Our nation faces increasing competition from abroad in technological innovation, the most powerful driver of our economy, while the academic performance of our school-age students in math and science lags behind many countries. Against this backdrop, it is imperative that we tap the talent and perspectives of both the male and female halves of our population. Until women can feel as much at home in math, science, and engineering as men, our nation will be considerably less than the sum of its parts. If we do not draw on the entire talent pool that is capable of making a contribution to science, the enterprise will inevitably be underperforming its potential

As the representation of women increases in every other profession in this country, if their representation in science and engineering does not change, these fields will look increasingly anachronistic, less attractive, and will be less strong. The nation cannot afford to lose ground in these areas, which not only fuel the economy, but also play a key role in solving critical societal problems in human health and the environment.

Much has already been learned from research in the classroom and from recent experience on our campuses about how we can encourage top performance from our students. For example, recent research shows that different teaching methods can lead to comparable performance for males and females in high school mathematics. One of the most important and effective actions we can take is to ensure that women have teachers who believe in them and strong, positive mentors, male and female, at every stage of their educational journey - both to affirm and to develop their talents. Low expectations of women can be as destructive as overt discrimination and may help to explain the disproportionate rate of attrition that occurs among female students as they proceed through the academic pipeline.

Colleges and universities must develop a culture, as well as specific policies, that enable women with children to strike a sustainable balance between workplace and home. Of course, achieving such a balance is a challenge in many highly demanding careers. As a society we must develop methods for assessing productivity and potential that take into account the long-term potential of an individual and encourage greater harmony between the cycle of work and the cycle of life - so that both women and men may better excel in the careers of their choice.

Although we have a very long way to travel in terms of recruiting, retaining, and promoting women faculty in scientific and engineering fields, we can also point to significant progress. According to the National Science Foundation, almost no doctoral degrees in engineering were awarded to women in 1966 (0.3 percent), in contrast to 16.9 percent in 2001. And in the biological and agricultural sciences, the number of doctorates earned by women rose from 12 percent to 43.5 percent between 1966 and 2001. Our three campuses, and many others, are home to growing numbers of women who have demonstrated not only extraordinary innate ability, but the kinds of creativity, determination, perceptiveness and hard work that are prerequisites for success in science and engineering, as in many other fields.

These figures demonstrate the expanding presence of women in disciplines that have not, historically, been friendly to them. It is a matter of vital concern, not only to the academy but also to society at large, that the future holds even greater opportunities for them.

John Hennessy is a computer scientist and president of Stanford University, Susan Hockfield is a neuroscientist and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Shirley Tilghman is a molecular geneticist and president of Princeton University.

[Press Release]

News coverage: Boston Globe.

Brian Weatherson proudly unveils his new sidebar with interesting links to other places on the web.

Here at semantics etc. as well, there have been sidebar changes.

• My quick links are now powered by del.icio.us. If you don’t want to check the main page regularly for new links, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of the quick links instead. Among other things, I will be using these links for when I find a new paper on the web, without feeling the need to post the abstract or make comments of my own.

• My blogroll is done via Bloglines. It will always reflect the list of linguistics and philosophy blogs that I am subscribed to.

National Science Foundation Names David Lightfoot as New Assistant Director for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences

The National Science Foundation has named eminent linguistic scientist and veteran administrator David W. Lightfoot to head its Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. He will take office on June 1.

Lightfoot, Dean of the Graduate School for Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University and a professor in its Department of Linguistics, will oversee NSF’s $197 million annual investments in fields such as anthropology, psychology, cognitive studies, political science, linguistics, risk management and economics.

“We are delighted to have a scholar of David Lightfoot’s caliber directing this critically important element of NSF’s portfolio at a particularly propitious time,” said NSF Director Arden L. Bement, Jr. “From the specter of terrorism to the tsunami devastation in the East to rapid social change and the ongoing global collision of cultures, the insights of social and behavioral research have never been more urgently needed.”

Lightfoot said, “I’m looking forward immensely to joining the National Science Foundation and to providing leadership in my new organization. The social and behavioral sciences are making exciting breakthroughs in basic understanding of humans and their world, and NSF will be an important catalyst in this process.”

Lightfoot has authored 10 books and several dozen scholarly papers on the origin, acquisition, development and historical evolution of language. He has elaborated and championed the theory, first posited by Noam Chomsky, that each human has a genetically innate but culturally unique “language organ” – a system of grammatical and knowledge patterns in the brain – whose functions can be studied through “cognitive physiology” and whose structure can be modified by “cues” from the social environment.

In his capacity as Dean at Georgetown University, Lightfoot promoted research collaborations in cognition and neurosciences, population health, bioinformatics, statistics and computing, among other initiatives.

Before coming to Georgetown in 2001, Lightfoot had established a new Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland and chaired it for 12 years. Previously he held academic positions at the University of Michigan, McGill University and the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. He has held numerous visiting appointments in Europe and South America.

Lightfoot received his bachelor’s degree from the University of London, King’s College, and his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Michigan. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, and has received several research grants from NSF and the University of Maryland.

As an Assistant Director of NSF, Lightfoot will lead NSF’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE), which comprises three divisions: Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, Social and Economic Sciences, and Science Resources Statistics.

For years, academic publishers have offered email alerts with table of contents of new issues of journals that one might be interested in. Now, we are starting to get RSS feeds that we can subscribe to in newsreaders like NetNewsWire or web-based services like Bloglines. Here’s one I just came across:

Journal of Semantics RSS feed

The feed is actually at .

I’ll be keeping an eye out for other semantics etc-related journal feeds.

All problem sets should be submitted in two copies. Here are our preferences in order:

1. plain text in email
2. pdf file attached to email
3. Word file attached to email
4. hard copy (2 copies)