11 September 2023
Defence of Jialiang Yan
Title: “Monotonicity in Intensional Contexts” The defence will be held at 14:00 CET on zoom.
Date & Time: 24-25 April 2025 Location: Bushuis Room F1.01B, Kloveniersburgwal 48, Amsterdam
See moreTitle: Not Nothing: Nonemptiness in Team Semantics Date & Time: Tuesday 1 April 2025, 16:00 Location: Agnietenkapel, Oudezijds Voorburgwal 231, Amsterdam Promotors: Robert van Rooij and Maria Aloni Copromotor: Fan Yang
See moreDate & Time: Monday 31 March 2025, 09:00-17:00 Location: Bushuis Room F1.01B, Kloveniersburgwal 48, Amsterdam We are organizing a workshop on team semantics and related topics on the occasion of Aleksi Anttila’s PhD defence. The speakers include Aleksi Anttila, Ivano Ciardelli, Simone Conti, Matilda Häggblom, Juha Kontinen, Jouko Väänänen, and Haoyu Wang.
See moreRonald de Haan has put together a prototype for a reasoning algorithm for bilateral state-based modal logic (BSML) based on answer set programming. Here you can find a brief demonstration and some explanations, as well as a list with some possible research directions: https://github.com/rdehaan/bsml-sat/blob/main/demo.ipynb There are a lot of small and large directions for improving this reasoner, and many of them are very much suitable for a small research project or a thesis. Please feel free to get in touch with Ronald (me@ronalddehaan.eu) if you are interested in this.
See moreOn 6 February the nihil project will host the Midterm reflection on AI workshop, where we will explore possible applications of the results of the Nihil project in AI and related areas.
See moreThis week, Matilda Häggblom from the University of Helsinki will be visiting the ILLC and NihiL project.
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.
ABC Support Grant: How does the brain process zero models? Sonia Ramotowska (FGW), Maria Aloni (FGW), Ingmar Visser (FMG)
See moreIn 2024-25, Haoyu Wang (Peking University) will be visiting the ILLC and NihiL project.
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.
See moreMaria taught a course on Team semantics: Linguistics and Philosophical Applications at the 4th Tsinghua Logic Summer School, 8-12 July 2024, Beijing, China
See moreMaria gave a ZAS semantic cirle talk in Berlin and then participated to the workshop on Speech Act related operators
See moreIn the spring, Milica Denic will be visiting the ILLC and NihiL project.
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.
See moreFrom 18 until 20 of March Justin Bledin from Johns Hopkins University will be visiting the NihiL project.
Aleksi Anttila, Søren Knudstorp, Fan Yang and Maria Aloni attended Dagstuhl seminar: Logics for Dependence and Independence: Expressivity and Complexity.
See moreAleksi Anttila, Fan Yang and Maria Aloni attended the workshop on Inquisitive Modal Logic and related topics in Padova.
See moreFrom 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.
See moreTomasz 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.
See moreOliver 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.
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.
See moreTitle: “Monotonicity in Intensional Contexts” The defence will be held at 14:00 CET on zoom.
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.
See moreSøren 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!
See moreApplication 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.
See moreTitle: 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].
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…
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