Being Logical About Desert Island Reading

Abstract

To begin with, I refuse to be stranded on a desert island: sand without vegetation, hot sun, and salty water are just not conducive to good thinking. So let’s get into deserted tropical island mood, which is what everyone else has been doing. First, let’s wind time back to around 1978. This is important because our bodies can do without some luxuries, and, let’s face it, life is generally more fun when one is young. We have a copy of Let’s go guide to Asia, the student bible to living on $5 a day. Reeling from the sights, smells, sounds, crowding and especially traffic of weeks of mid-day sun in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei and Bangkok, it is time to take a breather. A half-a-day train journey from Bangkok leaves us in Suratthani, 1 then a bus, followed by a ferry with farm animals, ending with a jump over the water (there is no gang plank), and we have (literally) landed on the island of Ko Samui, off the coast of Thailand. Locals with rickshaw-style tricycles and mopeds (no cars in sight on the island) invite you to stay on beaches with luxurious accommodations (palm huts over sand). After the obligatory swim, we finish off a lovely fried banana, regretfully refuse the itinerant peddler’s fresh Thai pineapple sliced on the spot (a sure way to get “Bali belly” because the hand touching the outside of the pineapple also touches the edible part), and manage to convince the locals to turn off the boombox playing “Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive”. (It is the height of Saturday Night Fever, and native culture in Southeast Asia is already reeling from the onslaught of Western nonsense, including blue jeans worn at 100 ◦ F in the shade.) We are sitting in a hut raised on stilts, watching the sun set. (See the above web site for visual aids in picturing the scene.) I dig through my pack to find something to read, and after tossing aside the latest James Clavell epic as being insufficiently uplifting, I find a photocopy of 22 pages of formal stuff titled “The Proper Treatment of Quantifiers in Ordinary English”. Since it is a chapter from a book (Hintikka et al., 1974), it doesn’t even have the name of the author on it, but vaguely it is coming back to me—yes, it is by Richard Montague. I start reading, but in a few minutes I doze off in the balmy breeze. (Scene repeats itself over 6 months on the beaches of Hawaii, Bali, New Zealand, New Caledonia, and Sri Lanka.) So why was I carrying this soporific with me? Well, having just finished a PhD thesis which had two linguists on the committee, I was doing what most like-minded computer scientists were doing at that time: trying to figure out intensional logic and Montague grammar. Montague’s semantics for natural language were deliciously perverse: the meaning of a proper noun like John was not a constant, as one might expect, but more like the set of properties that can be said to hold of that individual:lambda P. P(john). To make tricky things work out, the final meaning is actually (lambda P).([ ex P]) ( in john) and the meaning of “John sleeps” is obtained by applying the preceding function to the argument