Simonyi András

Jerry Hobbs's semantic programme and the heterological paradox  

Abstract:

  In the second half of the 1980s, Jerry R. Hobbs initiated an influential and still ongoing research programme in computational semantics, which used weighted abduction and "ontologically promiscuous",  radically reified first-order formalisations to interpret sentences in discourse. After a short introduction to Hobbs's programme, I will show that the well-known paradox of heterological words can be  reconstructed, and, consequently, a contradiction can be proven in Hobbs's framework using his core axioms and a few additional -- prima facie highly plausible -- assumptions.