We are pleased to announce that on Friday, December 5 at 4.30pm (CET), Lorenzo Rossi (University of Turin), jointly with Johannes Stern (University of Bristol), will give the talk Supervaluational Truth and Quantifiers as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia Fall 2025 organised by the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI.
The talk will be chaired by Léon Probst.
This hybrid talk will take place in Room 0.5 FTL Building (USI west campus) and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to events.isfi(a)usi.ch.
Here is the abstract of the talk:
Quantification has long been both a stumbling block and a testing ground in semantics. Building on Frege, Tarski developed the modern model-theoretic semantics for first-order logic (FOL), but many quantifiers (because of the Compactness and Löwenheim–Skolem Theorems) cannot be expressed within FOL. Mostowski and Lindström extended Tarski’s framework to capture quantifiers such as “finitely many” and “most”, giving rise to Generalized Quantifier Theory (GQT), now a standard tool in formal and natural language semantics. Still, challenges remain, especially where semantic indeterminacy arises. We focus on three sources of indeterminacy: (P) presupposition failure, (V) vagueness, and (L) semantic paradoxes. To address them, we propose a general framework for quantifier semantics in the presence of indeterminacy, and we develop two formal systems that (a) meet key desiderata for handling P, V, and L, and (b) recover a substantial fragment of GQT.
For more information: https://www.usi.ch/en/feeds/32641
