It’s the year 2000, but where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars.

In this chapter, the meaning of natural language is analysed along the lines proposed by Gottlob Frege. In building meaning representations, we assume that the meaning of a complex expression derives from the meanings of its components. Typed logic is a convenient tool to make this process of composition explicit. Typed logic allows for the building of semantic representations for formal languages and fragments of natural language in a compositional way. The chapter ends with the discussion of an example fragment. 1 Introduction An invitation to translate English sentences from the example fragments of natural language into predicate logic or predicate logic with generalized quantifiers presupposes two things: (i) that you grasp the meanings of the formulas of the representation language, and (ii) that you understand the meanings of the English sentences. Knowledge of the first kind can be made fully explicit; stating it in a fully explicit fashion is the job of the semantic truth def...

In this article, a qualitative notion of subjective plausibility and its revision based on a preorder relation are implemented in higher-order logic. This notion of plausibility is used for modeling pragmatic aspects of communication on top of traditional two-dimensional semantic representations. First, some prerequisites

There is a rich literature about the temporal conjunctions before/after, but I am not aware of an analysis of temporal comparatives früher/später, which may be used to express similar states of affairs, but are constructed differently. 2 • They are comparative constructions

This paper lies at the edge of the topic of the workshop. We can write down a Π1 1 axiom whose models are precisely the ∈-structures 〈Rα, ∈ ∩R2 α〉 where α> 0 and Rα is the collection of all (pure) sets of rank < α. From this, one can consider the introduction of new axioms concerning the size of α. The question of the grounds for doing so is perhaps the central question of the workshop. But I want to discuss another question which, as I said, arises at the periphery: How do we know that there are structures 〈Rα, ∈ ∩R2 α〉? How do we know that there exist such things as sets and how do we know that, given such things, the axioms we write down are true of them? These seem very primitive questions, but the skepticism implicit in them has deep (and ancient) roots. In particular, they are questions about ideal objects in general, and not just about the actual infinite. I want to explain why I think the questions (as intended) are empty and the skepticism unfounded. 1 I will be expanding the argument of the first part of my paper “Proof and truth: the Platonism of mathematics”[1986a]. 2 The argument in question