Frege's puzzle poses two central problems in semantics and the philosophy of language, namely how it is that identities composed of coextensive singular terms can be nontrivial, that is,...Show moreFrege's puzzle poses two central problems in semantics and the philosophy of language, namely how it is that identities composed of coextensive singular terms can be nontrivial, that is, informative, on the one hand (e.g., 'a = b' is informative, 'a = a' is not), and how it is that coextensive singular terms are not substitutable salva veritate in intensional contexts on the other (e.g., 'a = b', 'John knows that a = c', ⊭ 'John knows that b = c'). Gottlob Frege famously postulated his sense/reference distinction in order to resolve these puzzles. However, thinkers like Bertrand Russell and Saul Kripke contested his solution. This thesis presents a novel solution to Frege’s puzzle, based on the appreciation that a term’s extension consists of more than just the object to which it refers, amounting to a reappraisal of Frege’s original solution. Furthermore, some additional consequences for both logical and model-theoretical considerations are sketched based on this.Show less
Artificial Grammar Learning (AGL) is a powerful experimental paradigm for testing specific hypotheses about language acquisition but is limited because of its reliance on meaningless grammatical...Show moreArtificial Grammar Learning (AGL) is a powerful experimental paradigm for testing specific hypotheses about language acquisition but is limited because of its reliance on meaningless grammatical structures. Meanwhile, formal and computational semantics provide rigorous ways to define and calculate meanings for formal languages, but are typically only used to describe or simulate the linguistic competence of adult speakers. This thesis attempts to connect these two fields by proposing a new type of AGL experiment that uses a language with both a context-free syntax and a formally defined semantics which can be used to express spatial relationships between objects. Moreover, using a computer simulation in which an Intelligent Agent (IA) acquires such a language, it shows how this new paradigm can be used to test psycholinguistic hypotheses about the acquisition of both syntax and semantics.Show less
