Mathematical Logic Seminars

Presentation of a formal logic called Natural Term Logic (NTL) which is based on the syntactic and logical structure of natural language, by Bruno Dinis, assistant professor at Universidade de Évora, member of Department of Mathematics and CIMA - Centro de Investigação em Matemática e Aplicações.

CEMS.UL invites to participate in talk about formal logic called Natural Term Logic (NTL) which is based on the syntactic and logical structure of natural language. NTL can be seen as a refinement of the ideas of Quine's paper 'Variables Explained Away' and the technical concepts introduced by Bealer and Zalta. NTL is more fine-grained than Bealer's first-order intensional logic (BL): there is a many-to-one correspondence $\nu$ between NTL terms, closed BL terms and a one-to-one correspondence $\beta$ which assings to each BL term a corresponding NTL term. I will define a series of reductions on NTL for which every NTL term T reduces to a unique normal term N. It is possible to show that $\nu$ is invariant under these reductions and that $\beta \nu T = N$, thus closed terms of BL represent normal NTL terms. The above results depend on a mathematical treatment of permutations and equivalence relations on finite totally ordered sets, a theory we call plectology and which we believe to be of interest in its own right.

Joint work with Clarence Protin.

Come and join us!

15 december 2025 at 3 p.m. in room 6.2.33 at Ciências ULisboa