Constructive Type Theory and the Dialogical Approach to Meaning

In its origins Dialogical logic constituted one part of a new movement called the Erlangen School or Erlangen Constructivism. Its goal was to provide a new start to a general theory of language and of science. According to the Erlangen-School, language is not just a fact that we discover, but a human cultural accomplishment whose construction reason can and should control. The resulting project of intentionally constructing a scientific language was called the Orthosprache-project. Unfortunately, the Orthosprache-project was not further developed and seemed to fade away. It is possible that one of the reasons for this fading away is that the link between dialogical logic and Orthosprache was not sufficiently developed - in particular, the new theory of meaning to be found in dialogical logic seemed to be cut off from both the project of establishing the basis for scientific language and also from a general theory of meaning. We would like to contribute to clarifying one possible way in which a general dialogical theory of meaning could be linked to dialogical logic. The idea behind the proposal is to make use of constructive type theory in which logical inferences are preceded by the description of a fully interpreted language. The latter, we think, provides the means for a new start not only for the project of Orthosprache, but also for a general dialogical theory of meaning

On the Computational Meaning of Axioms

An anti-realist theory of meaning suitable for both logical and proper axioms is investigated. As opposed to other anti-realist accounts, like Dummett-Prawitz verificationism, the standard framework of classical logic is not called into question. In particular, semantical features are not limited solely to inferential ones, but also computational aspects play an essential role in the process of determination of meaning. In order to deal with such computational aspects, a relaxation of syntax is shown to be necessary. This leads to a general kind of proof theory, where the objects of study are not typed objects like deductions, but rather untyped ones, in which formulas have been replaced by geometrical configurations

Ludics, Dialogue and Interaction: PRELUDE Project - 2006-2009. Revised Selected Papers

The article collected in this volume are based on contributions to workshops and meetings that were held within the context of the PRELUDE Project

Advances in Abstract Categorial Grammars: Language Theory and Linguistic Modeling. ESSLLI 2009 Lecture Notes, Part II

These are the lecture notes of the ESSLLI 2009 second week course on Abstract Categorial Grammar. This was an advanced course, while an introductory course was given the first week: Introduction to Abstract Categorial Grammars: Foundations and main properties, delivered by Philippe de Groote and Sylvain Salvati. An up-to-date version of these notes, possible errata, and generally ACG papers, can be found at the ACG homepage: http://calligramme.loria.fr/acg. At this URL, the ACG Development Toolkit is also available and downloadable as free software. It might be useful to run some of the examples given in these notes. In particular, some of the latter are gathered in a special file. The Abstract Categorial Grammar (ACG) framework, a grammar formalism based on the typed lambda calculus, elegantly generalizes and unifies a variety of grammar formalisms that have been proposed for the description of formal and natural languages. The first part of the course investigated formal-language-theoretic properties of "second-order" ACGs, a subclass of ACGs that have "context-free" derivations. Their generative capacity was precisely characterized. Lecture notes for this part are available at http://research.nii.ac.jp/~kanazawa/publications/esslli2009_lectures.pdf. An efficient Earley-style algorithm, suitable both for parsing and generation, was then presented. The second part of the course (these present notes) presents linguistic applications of ACGs and gives various illustrations of how ACGs provide flexible and explicit ways to model the syntax-semantics interface of natural language

Framing Strategies in Role-Playing Games. 'My Pleasure': Toward a Poetics of Framing in Tabletop Role-playing Games

The dissertation discusses the use and impact of “literary” framing (as by Werner Wolf) in generating and negotiating fictional spaces, narratives and meanings within the medium of tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs). In a second step, the text describes some of the specific and most salient framing features and strategies used by players during game sessions. By analyzing these through actual gameplay it is possible to identify the ‘transceptional’ border (Bunia) between reality and fiction to be the constitutive moment of role-play where players are both aware of, and immersed in, the fiction they collaboratively construct. Finally, the dissertation adapts Wolf’s theoretical framework in order to discuss and analyze the often overlooked category of “storytelling” TRPGs - one that, as the text argues, rather than focusing on narrative as such, aims at creating gameplay texts with heightened aesthetic and literary value while also enabling players to experience particular forms of immersion and deep emotional involvement. In the conclusion, the dissertation proposes re-conceptualizing literary framing as a defining characteristic of the fictional practice in general across media. In this regard, the dissertation argues, TRPGs reveal how framings are used and adapted in order to enable a specific mode of human interaction which is based on the figuration of emotional complexes via fictional “masks.

Moving Circles: mobile media and playful identities

The mobile phone has become part of our everyday lives with astonishing speed. Over four billion people now have access to mobile phones, and this number keeps increasing. Mobile media technologies shape how we communicate with each other, and relate to the world. This raises questions about their influence on identity. Medium-specific properties and user-practices challenge the idea that we understand ourselves through stories. It is proposed that the notion of play sheds new light on how technologies shape identities. The mobile phone mediates identities on four play levels: we play on the mobile, with the mobile, through the mobile, and at the same time we are played by the mobile. Mobile media bring new freedom of movement. Yet at the same time they constrict us. In this dialectic we become moving circles

World and Logic

What is the relationship between the world and logic, between intuition and language, between objects and their quantitative determinations? Rationalists, on the one hand, hold that the world is structured in a rational way. Representationalists, on the other hand, assume that language, logic, and mathematics are only the means to order and describe the intuitively given world. In World and Logic, Jens Lemanski takes up three surprising arguments from Arthur Schopenhauer’s hitherto undiscovered Berlin Lectures, which concern the philosophy of language, logic, and mathematics. Based on these arguments, Lemanski develops a new position entitled ‘rational representationalism’: the world is always structured by human beings according to linguistic, logical, and mathematical principles, but the basic vocabulary of these structural descriptions already contains metaphors taken from the world around us