# Seminar in Semantics / Philosophy of Language # or: **What Philosophers and Linguists Can Learn From Theoretical Computer Science But Didn't Know To Ask** This course is co-taught by [Chris Barker](http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cb125/) and [Jim Pryor](http://www.jimpryor.net/). Linguistics calls it "G61.3340" and Philosophy calls it "G83.2296" The seminar meets in spring 2015 on Thursdays from 4-7, in the Linguistics building at 10 Washington Place, in room 104 (back of the first floor). ## Announcements ## This wiki will be undergoing lots of changes throughout the semester, and particularly in these first few days as we get it set up, migrate over some of the content from the previous time we taught this course, and iron out various technical wrinkles. Please be patient. If you've eager to learn, though, you don't have to wait on us to be ready to serve you. You can go look at the [archived first version](http://lambda1.jimpryor.net) of this course. Just keep in mind that the text and links there haven't been updated. ## Course Overview ## The goal of this seminar is to introduce concepts and techniques from theoretical computer science and show how they can provide insight into established philosophical and linguistic problems. This is not a seminar about any particular technology or software. Rather, it's about a variety of conceptual/logical ideas that have been developed in computer science and that linguists and philosophers ought to know, or may already be unknowingly trying to reinvent. Philosphers and linguists tend to reuse the same familiar tools in ever more (sometime spectacularly) creative ways. But when your only hammer is classical logic, every problem looks like modus ponens. In contrast, computer scientists have invested considerable ingenuity in studying tool design, and have made remarkable progress. "Why shouldn't I reinvent some idea X for myself? It's intellectually rewarding!" Yes it is, but it also takes time you might have better spent elsewhere. After all, you can get anywhere you want to go by walking, but you can accomplish more with a combination of walking and strategic subway rides. More importantly, the idiosyncrasies of your particular implementation may obscure what's fundamental to the idea you're working with. Your implementation may be buggy in corner cases you didn't think of; it may be incomplete and not trivial to generalize; its connection to existing literature and neighboring issues may go unnoticed. For all these reasons you're better off understanding the state of the art. The theoretical tools we'll be introducing aren't very familiar to everyday programmers, but they are prominent in academic computer science, especially in the fields of functional programming and type theory. Of necessity, this course will lay a lot of logical groundwork. But throughout we'll be aiming to mix that groundwork with real cases in our home subjects where these tools play central roles. Our aim for the course is to enable you to make these tools your own; to have enough understanding of them to recognize them in use, use them yourself at least in simple ways, and to be able to read more about them when appropriate. ## Who Can Participate? ## The course will not presume previous experience with programming. We will, however, discuss concepts embodied in specific programming languages, and we will encourage experimentation with running, modifying, and writing computer programs. The course will not presume lots of mathematical or logical background, either. However, it will demand a certain amount of comfort working with such material; as a result, it will not be especially well-suited to be a first graduate-level course in formal semantics or philosophy of language. If you have concerns about your background, come discuss them with us. Faculty and students from outside of NYU Linguistics and Philosophy are welcome to audit, to the extent that this coheres well with the needs of our local students. ## Recommended Software ## During the course, we'll be encouraging you to try out various things in Scheme and Caml, which are prominent *functional programming languages*. We'll explain what that means during the course. * **Scheme** is one of two major dialects of *Lisp*, which is a large family of programming languages. Scheme is the more clean and minimalistic dialect, and is what's mostly used in academic circles. Scheme itself has umpteen different "implementations", which share most of their fundamentals, but have slightly different extensions and interact with the operating system differently. One major implementation used to be called PLT Scheme, and has just in the past few weeks changed their name to Racket. This is what we recommend you use. (If you're already using or comfortable with another Scheme implementation, though, there's no compelling reason to switch.) Racket stands to Scheme in something like the relation Firefox stands to HTML. * **Caml** is one of two major dialects of *ML*, which is another large family of programming languages. Caml has only one active implementation, OCaml, developed by the INRIA academic group in France. * Those of you with some programming background may have encountered a third prominent functional programming language, **Haskell**. This is also used a lot in the academic contexts we'll be working through. Its surface syntax differs from Caml, and there are various important things one can do in each of Haskell and Caml that one can't (or can't as easily) do in the other. But these languages also have a lot in common, and if you're familiar with one of them, it's not difficult to move between it and the other. ## Recommended Books ## It's not *mandatory* to purchase these for the class. But they are good ways to get a more thorough and solid understanding of some of the more basic conceptual tools we'll be using. We especially recommend the first three of them. * *An Introduction to Lambda Calculi for Computer Scientists*, by Chris Hankin, currently $18 paperback on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0954300653). * *The Little Schemer, Fourth Edition*, by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen, currently $29 paperback on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262560992). This is a classic text introducing the gentle art of programming, using the functional programming language Scheme. Many people love this book, but it has an unusual dialog format that is not to everybody's taste. **Of particular interest for this course** is the explanation of the Y combinator, available as a free sample chapter [at the MIT Press web page for the book](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/). * *The Seasoned Schemer*, also by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen, currently $29 paperback on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/Seasoned-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/026256100X). This is a sequel to The Little Schemer, and it focuses on mutation and continuations in Scheme. We will be covering those topics in the second half of the course. * *The Little MLer*, by Matthias Felleisen and Daniel P. Friedman, currently $31 paperback / $29 kindle on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/Little-MLer-Matthias-Felleisen/dp/026256114X). This covers much of the same introductory ground as The Little Schemer, but this time in a dialect of ML. It doesn't use OCaml, the dialect we'll be working with, but instead another dialect of ML called SML. The syntactic differences between these languages is slight. ([Here's a translation manual between them](http://www.mpi-sws.org/~rossberg/sml-vs-ocaml.html).) Still, that does add an extra layer of interpretation, and you might as well just use The Little Schemer instead. Those of you who are already more comfortable with OCaml (or with Haskell) than with Scheme might consider working through this book instead of The Little Schemer; for the rest of you, or those of you who *want* practice with Scheme, go with The Little Schemer. * Another good book covering the same ground as the Hankin book, but more thoroughly, and in a more mathematical style, is *Lambda-Calculus and Combinators: an Introduction*, by J. Roger Hindley and Jonathan P. Seldin, currently $74 hardback / $65 kindle on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0521898854). This book is substantial and though it doesn't presuppose any specific mathematical background knowledge, it will be a good choice only if you're already comfortable reading advanced math textbooks. If you choose to read both the Hankin book and this book, you'll notice the authors made some different terminological/notational choices. At first, this makes comprehension slightly slower, but in the long run it's helpful because it makes the arbitrariness of those choices more salient. * Another good book, covering some of the same ground as the Hankin, and the Hindley & Seldin, but delving deeper into typed lambda calculi, is *Types and Programming Languages*, by Benjamin Pierce, currently $77 hardback / $68 kindle on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0262162091). This book has many examples in OCaml. ---- All wikis are supposed to have a [[SandBox]], so this one does too. This wiki is powered by [[ikiwiki]].