News

14 November 2024

Protest against education budget cuts

On November 14, a broad coalition of students, employees, and labour unions will hold a protest march against the drastic austerity measures proposed by the current Dutch government. The march will take place in Utrecht, from 13:00 to 15:00. We will gather at Moreelsepark and march from there to Domplein.


1 November 2024

ABC Grant for Sonia Ramotowska

ABC Support Grant: How does the brain process zero models? Sonia Ramotowska (FGW), Maria Aloni (FGW), Ingmar Visser (FMG)

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16 October 2024

Marco Degano’s post-defence workshop

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15 October 2024

Marco Degano’s doctoral defence

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1 October 2024

Haoyu Wang visiting the Nihil Project

In 2024-25, Haoyu Wang (Peking University) will be visiting the ILLC and NihiL project.


20 September 2024

Tomasz at Sinn und Bedeutung 29

Tomasz presented the results of experiment on Neglect-Zero effects in the interpretation of quantifiers and disjunction, conducted in collaboration with Oliver Bott, Fabian Schlotterbeck, Sonia Ramotowska and Maria Aloni as a part of the Does semantics have a too many tools problem? workshop.

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9 July 2024

Søren Receives the 2024 Kleene Award!

Søren Brinck Knudstorp was awarded the 2024 Kleene Award for Best Student Paper at LICS 2024. His paper, Relevant S is Undecidable, is available here, and the video of him receiving the award can be viewed here.


8 July 2024

Maria at Tsinghua Logic Summer School

Maria taught a course on Team semantics: Linguistics and Philosophical Applications at the 4th Tsinghua Logic Summer School, 8-12 July 2024, Beijing, China

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25 June 2024

Maria in Berlin

Maria gave a ZAS semantic cirle talk in Berlin and then participated to the workshop on Speech Act related operators

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10 June 2024

Maria at WoLLIC 2024

Maria gave an invited talk at WoLLIC 2024 in Bern. Slides

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1 April 2024

Milica Denic is visiting the Nihil Project.

In the spring, Milica Denic will be visiting the ILLC and NihiL project.


30 March 2024

NihiL members will present at the TLLM Workshop.

Aleksi Anttila, Marco Degano, Tomasz Klochowicz and Søren Knudstorp will present their work on “How to Split a Relation” and Aleksi Anttila will present “Further Remarks on the Dual Negation in Team Semantics” at the 4th Tsinghua Interdisciplinary Workshop on Logic, Language, and Meaning.

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18 March 2024

Justin Bledin is visiting the Nihil Project.

From 18 until 20 of March Justin Bledin from Johns Hopkins University will be visiting the NihiL project.


11 March 2024

NihiL members attending Dagstuhl workshop on Logics for Dependence and Independence.

Aleksi Anttila, Søren Knudstorp, Fan Yang and Maria Aloni attended Dagstuhl seminar: Logics for Dependence and Independence: Expressivity and Complexity.

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22 February 2024

NihiL members attending the workshop on Inquisitive Modal Logic.

Aleksi Anttila, Fan Yang and Maria Aloni attended the workshop on Inquisitive Modal Logic and related topics in Padova.

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31 January 2024

The NihiL workshop.

From 31 January until 2 February 2024 we organised the NihiL workshop to bring together linguists, philosophers, logicians, and cognitive scientists who share an interest in the interfaces between (non-classical) logic, language and cognition.

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26 January 2024

NELS poster talk by Tomasz Klochowicz

Tomasz Klochowicz will present his work on Free Choice Question at The 54th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society (NELS 54) hosted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Title: Free Choice Questions

Abstract: Polar questions like ‘May I go to the park or to the beach?’ give rise to inferences similar to Free Choice Permission. The Yes answer to these questions corresponds to the permission to freely choose between going to the park and going to the beach. No corresponds to Dual Prohibition, i.e., prohibition to go to either place. I empirically tested these intuitions. I will indicate how the collected data can allow us to establish the source of these inferences and compare the findings to predictions made by current theories of Free Choice extended with question semantics. The collected data poses a challenge to the semantic and scalar approaches to free choice and supports non-scalar pragmatics as a uniform solution to the free choice puzzle.

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24 January 2024

Visitors of the NihiL project.

Oliver Bott from Universität Bielefeld and Fabian Schlotterbeck from Universität Tübingen will be visiting the NihiL project in January and February! We look forward to a friutfull collaboration on experimenting with zero models.


18 November 2023

PALLMYR talk by Tomasz Klochowicz

Tomasz Klochowicz presented his work on Free Choice Question at XIII Paris-Amsterdam-London Logic Meeting for Young Reaserchers
Title: Free Choice Questions

Abstract: Polar questions like ‘May I go to the park or to the beach?’ give rise to inferences similar to Free Choice Permission. The Yes answer to these questions corresponds to the permission to freely choose between going to the park and going to the beach. No corresponds to Dual Prohibition, i.e., prohibition to go to either place. I empirically tested these intuitions. I will indicate how the collected data can allow us to establish the source of these inferences and compare the findings to predictions made by current theories of Free Choice extended with question semantics. The collected data poses a challenge to the semantic and scalar approaches to free choice and supports non-scalar pragmatics as a uniform solution to the free choice puzzle.

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11 September 2023

Defence of Jialiang Yan

Title: “Monotonicity in Intensional Contexts” The defence will be held at 14:00 CET on zoom.


6 September 2023

SuB28 Poster Marco Degano

Marco Degano will present joint work with Paul Marty, Sonia Ramotowska, Maria Aloni, Richard Breheny, Jacopo Romoli, and Yasu Sudo at Sinn und Bedeutung 28.
Title: Distinguishing between speaker’s uncertainty and possibility

Abstract: The work reports on two experiments that tested whether sentences containing disjunctions like “the mystery box contains a blue ball or a yellow ball” can give rise to possibility inferences without uncertainty. The results showed that participants derived possibility inferences even when uncertainty was not present, challenging traditional accounts of ignorance inferences and supporting recent proposals that derive possibility independently of uncertainty.

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27 June 2023

Søren Brinck Knudstorp awarded the VvL Master’s Thesis Prize 2023!

Søren Brinck Knudstorp was awarded the VvL Master’s Thesis Prize 2023 for his Thesis: Modal Information Logics written under the supervision of Johan van Benthem & Nick Bezhanishvili). Congratulations!

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31 May 2023

Open position: Postdoc in Logic and Cognition

Application deadline: The deadline for applying for this vacancy is 31 May 2023 The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) currently has a vacant Postdoc researcher position as part of the Nothing is Logical (Nihil) project, led by dr. M.D. Aloni.

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31 March 2023

Maria Aloni will deliver the Annual Logic Lecture at the University Of Connecticut

Title: Nothing is Logical
Abstract: People often reason contrary to the prescriptions of classical logic. In the talk I will discuss some cases of divergence between everyday and logical-mathematical reasoning and propose that they are a consequence of a tendency in human cognition to neglect models which verify sentences by virtue of an empty configuration [neglect-zero tendency, Aloni 2022]. I will then introduce a bilateral state-based modal logic (BSML) which formally represents the neglect-zero tendency and can be used to rigorously study its impact on reasoning and interpretation. After discussing some of the applications, I will compare BSML with related systems (truthmaker semantics, possibility semantics, and inquisitive semantics) via translations into Modal Information Logic [van Benthem 2019].

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2 February 2023

LIRa session: Jialiang Yan

Title: Knowing and believing an epistemic possibility
Abstract: What does it mean to know or believe that something might be the case? In this talk, we address the issue focusing on the epistemic possibility expressed by English might when embedded under the propositional attitude verbs know and believe. We present some puzzles to highlight the challenges arising from such know-might and believe-might sentences…

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23 January 2023

MoL defense of Bo Flachs

Title: Neglect-Zero Effects on Indicative Conditionals: Extending BSML and BiUS with an implication
Location: Room F1.15, Science Park 107, Amsterdam
Supervisor: Maria Aloni

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