Semantics of natural language: Editorial introduction

TLDR: A small working conference on the semantics of natural language in August of 1969 is organized, and a volume to encourage the active exchange of ideas among logicians, philosophers and linguists who are working on semantics for natural languages.

Abstract: The success of linguistics in treating natural languages as formal syntactic systems has aroused the interest of a number of linguists in a parallel or related development of semantics. For the most part quite independently, many philosophers and logicians have recently been applying formal semantic methods to structures increasingly like natural languages. While differences in training, method and vocabulary tend to veil the fact, philosophers and linguists are converging, it seems, on a common set of interrelated problems. Since philosophers and linguists are working on the same, or very similar, problems, it would obviously be instructive to compare notes. Inspired by this thought, we organized a small working conference on the semantics of natural language in August of 1969. The conference was sponsored by the Council for Philosophical Studies, and supported by the Council and the National Science Foundation. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California supplied a noble setting for our talks, and lent its efficient and friendly help in other ways. A number of the papers in this volume spring from talks given at that summer conference, or were written by people who were there; the rest are by people we wish could have been there. The purpose of the volume is the same as that of the conference: to encourage the active exchange of ideas among logicians, philosophers and linguists who are working on semantics for natural languages. We trust it will be agreed that there is more to this than the usual business of rubbing two or more disciplines together in the expectation of heat and the hope of light. In the present case, a common enterprise already exists; our aim is to make it a cooperative one. DONALD DAVIDSON GILBERT HARMAN