LING 360 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: First-Order Logic, Edward Jenner, Spontaneous Generation

• School: McGill University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 360
• Professor: Brendan S.Gillon

Document Summary

We cannot use semantics until we have some kind of view of the syntax in the language we are studying. Difference with a logics course: in logics you learn the notation of logic and you go from there, but for us in semantics, the difference between notation and meaning in language is crucial. In order to do logic, you must understand set theory. We need to control for those confounding factors. This section refers to the material relevant to the meaning of basic expressions. Doing logic and semantics requires correct beliefs about the world around us as it is. If a ship sails out to see, it not only gets smaller and smaller but it also disappears into the horizon from bottom to top. If you see this 4-5-6 times you can make a conclusion about it. Step beyond that: coming up with a hypothesis that explains that regularity and then investigate that hypothesis.