Solving Partee’s Temperature Puzzle in an EFL-Ontology
Kristina Liefke · 2014
According to the received view of type-logical semantics (suggested by Montague and adopted by many of his successors), the number of a semantics' basic types depends proportionally on the syntactic and lexical diversity of the modeled natural language fragment. This paper provides a counterexample to this principle. In particular, it shows that Partee's temperature puzzle – whose solution is commonly taken to require a basic type for indices (for the formation of individual concepts) or for individual concepts – can be interpreted in the poorer type system from [21], which only assumes basic individuals and propositions. We use this result to defend the invariance of formal semantic models under their objects' codings. This result further contributes to the project of identifying the minimal semantic requirements on models for certain linguistic fragments.