-Welcome to your new wiki.
+# Seminar in Semantics / Philosophy of Language #
-All wikis are supposed to have a [[SandBox]], so this one does too.
+or: **What Philosophers and Linguists Can Learn From Theoretical Computer Science But Didn't Know To Ask**
-Sample content.
+This course will be co-taught by [Chris Barker](http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cb125/) and [Jim Pryor](http://www.jimpryor.net/). Linguistics calls it "G61.3340-002" and Philosophy calls it "G83.2296-001."
-More content added by git.
-CB:Here's some content added by me using git.
+## Announcements ##
-Enabled "lockedit" plugin: testing that admins can still edit pages.
+The seminar meets on Mondays from 4-6, in
+the Linguistics building at 10 Washington Place, in room 104 (back of the first floor).
-CB: content added by editing the wiki page using a browser.
+One student session will be held every Wednesday from 3-4. The other will be arranged to fit the schedule of those who'd like to attend but can't make the Wednesday time. (We first proposed Tuesdays from 11-12, but this time turns out not to be so helpful.) If you're one of the students who wants to meet for Q&A at some other time in the week, let us know.
-----
+You should see the student sessions as opportunities to clear up lingering issues from material we've discussed, and help get a better footing for what we'll be doing the next week. It would be smart to make a serious start on that week's homework, for instance, before the session.
+
+There is now a [[lambda evaluator]] you can use in your browser (no need to install any software).
+It can help you check whether your answer to some of the homework questions works correctly.
+
+There is now a [library](/lambda_library) of lambda-calculus arithmetical and list operations, some relatively advanced.
+
+
+<!--
+ To play around with a **typed lambda calculus**, which we'll look at later
+ in the course, have a look at the [Penn Lambda Calculator](http://www.ling.upenn.edu/lambda/).
+ This requires installing Java, but provides a number of tools for evaluating
+ lambda expressions and other linguistic forms. (Mac users will most likely
+ already have Java installed.)
+-->
+
+
+## Lecture Notes and Assignments ##
+
+(13 Sept) Lecture notes for [[Week1]]; [[Assignment1]].
+
+Topics: Applications; Basics of Lambda Calculus; Comparing Different Languages
+
+(20 Sept) Lecture notes for [[Week2]]; [[Assignment2]].
+
+Topics: Reduction and Convertibility; Combinators; Evaluation Strategies and Normalization; Decidability; Lists and Numbers
+
+(27 Sept) Lecture notes for [[Week3]]; [[Assignment3]].
+
+Topics: Recursion with Fixed Point Combinators
+
+(4 Oct) Lecture notes for Week 4
+
+<!-- Introducing the notion of a "continuation", which technique we'll now already have used a few times
+-->
+
+[[Upcoming topics]]
+
+
+##[[Offsite Reading]]##
+
+There's lots of links here already to tutorials and encyclopedia entries about many of the notions we'll be dealing with.
+
+
+
+## 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.
+
+Once we get up and running, the central focii of the course will be
+**continuations**, **types**, and **monads**. One of the on-going themes will
+concern evaluation order and issues about how computations (inferences,
+derivations) unfold in (for instance) time. The key analytic technique is to
+form a static, order-independent model of a dynamic process. We'll be
+discussing this in much more detail as the course proceeds.
+
+The logical systems we'll be looking at include:
-Some programming resources:
+* the pure/untyped lambda calculus
+* combinatorial logic
+* the simply-typed lambda calculus
+* polymorphic types with System F
+* some discussion of dependent types
+* if time permits, "indeterministic" or "preemptively parallel" computation and linear logic
-Books:
- *The Little Schemer*, by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen, currently $23 on [Amazon]
-(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262560992/ref=pd_sim_books/103-5471398-9229403#reader_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, avaialble as a free sample chapter
-[at the MIT Press web page for the book](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/).
+<!--
+Other keywords:
+ recursion using the Y-combinator
+ evaluation-order stratgies
+ normalizing properties
+ the Curry-Howard isomorphism(s)
+ monads in category theory and computation
+-->
+## 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.
+
+This class will count as satisfying the logic requirement for Philosophy
+PhD students; however if this would be your first or only serious
+engagement with graduate-level formal work you should consider
+carefully, and must discuss with us, (1) whether you'll be adequately
+prepared for this course, and (2) whether you'd be better served by
+taking a logic course (at a neighboring department, or at NYU next year)
+with a more canonical syllabus.
+
+
+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.
+
+[[How to get the programming languages running on your computer]]
+
+[[Family tree of functional programming languages]]
+
+
+## Recommended Books ##
+
+It's not necessary 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.
+
+* *An Introduction to Lambda Calculi for Computer Scientists*, by Chris
+Hankin, currently $17 on
+[Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Lambda-Calculi-Computer-Scientists/dp/0954300653).
+
+* (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. 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.)
+
+
+* *The Little Schemer, Fourth Edition*, by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias
+Felleisen, currently $23 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 $28
+on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/Seasoned-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/026256100X)
+
+* *The Little MLer*, by Matthias Felleisen and Daniel P. Friedman, currently $27
+on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/Little-MLer-Matthias-Felleisen/dp/026256114X).
+This covers some of the same introductory ground as The Little Schemer, but
+this time in ML. It uses another dialect of ML (called SML), instead of OCaml, but there are only
+superficial syntactic differences between these languages. [Here's a translation
+manual between them](http://www.mpi-sws.org/~rossberg/sml-vs-ocaml.html).
+
+
+
+----
+
+All wikis are supposed to have a [[SandBox]], so this one does too.
This wiki is powered by [[ikiwiki]].
+
+[[Test]]
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