Re: SUO: *Date 24 Mar 2002 -- Program Semantics
On Sun, Mar 24, 2002 at 02:52:42PM -0800, John Sowa wrote:
> I agree that Montague's system has had more influence among professional
> linguists, but that is primarily because liguists feel that a logician
> is more prestigious and worthy of a citation than a mere computer
> programmer.
Let's not be silly here, John. Wood's work may be just dandy, but it
was hardly a bias against programmers, and awe for logicians, that
caused Montague's work to get all the attention among linguists. It
it was because of Montague's great sensitivity to a wide range of
grammatical phenomena in natural language that had been entirely
overlooked by philosophers and logicians to that point, as well as his
wide knowledge of syntactic theory. And, of course, the paradigm itself
was extraordinarily fruitful.
> But much as I like lambda calculus, I believe that Montague's
> formalism was a disaster that has done more to hinder wide spread use
> of logic than it has done to promote it.
Rubbish.
Cheers!
-chris