Abstract: At the Dawn of Formal Semantics

Formal Semantics as we now know it is to a large extent rooted in the work of Frege and Russell. Still, it’s fair to say that early Wittgenstein, despite the notoriously condensed formulation in his Tractatus, has made important contributions, too. Indeed, not the logical foundations of mathematics, but ordinary language had primary stage in his attempt to clarify the status of philosophical problems.

In this presentation, I shall give an impression of recent extensions to my earlier research on the tractarian system (Van der Does, 2011). Themes alluded to include:

1. The nature of elementary sentences as basic logical models,
2. The tractarian approach to quantification, both elementary and higher-order.

In passing, we shall note which role the notion of use plays in applying the system for philosophical purposes. This role seems so prominent that the gap between early and late Wittgenstein becomes much less dramatic than is often claimed. (The use part is based on joint work with Martin Stokhof.)s