David Lewis and Formal Semantics today (Slides)

Here are the slides for my talk at the Manchester conference on David Lewis and his Place in the History of Analytic Philosophy, June 17, 2019. The talk looked at David Lewis’s chapter V of Convention and at General Semantics. It focused on those aspects of David Lewis’s semantic work that have had a lasting impact on Formal Semantics, as currently pursued within both Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language: (1) visions about the role of semantics within a theory of grammar, (2) theories of meaning composition, including rule-by-rule interpretation (Convention) and type-driven interpretation (General Semantics), and (3) the interpretation of quantifier phrases as generalized quantifiers. For each of the three areas, I placed David Lewis’s contributions within a historical context, tracking the available tools at the time: a Tarskian semantics, categorial grammars (Ajdukiewicz), the typed lambda-calculus, including types for generalized quantifiers (Church), intensions as functions from possible worlds (construed as state-descriptions) to extensions (Carnap), and generative syntax (Chomsky). The paper concluded by placing Lewis’s contributions to contemporary Formal Semantics next to those by Richard Montague