Table Of ContentLOGIC, LANGUAGE AND REASONING
TRENDS IN LOGIC
Studia Logica Library
VOLUME 5
Managing Editor
Ryszard W6jcicki, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology,
Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
Editors
Petr Hajek, Institute of Computer Sciences,
Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, Czech Republic
David Makinson, Ville d'Avray, France
Daniele Mundici, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Milan, Italy
Krister Segerberg, Department of Philosophy, Uppsala University,
Uppsala, Sweden
Alasdair Urquhart, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, Canada
Assistant Editor
Jacek Malinowski, Box 61, UPT 00-953, Warszawa 37, Poland
SCOPE OF THE SERIES
Trends in Logic is a bookseries covering essentially the same area as the
journal Studia Logica - that is, contemporary formal logic and its applica
tions and relations to other disciplines. These include artificial intelligence,
informatics, cognitive science, philosophy of science, and the philosophy of
language. However, this list is not exhaustive, moreover, the range of appli
cations, comparisons and sources of inspiration is open and evolves over
time.
LOGIC, LANGUAGE
AND REASONING
Essays in Honour of Dov Gabbay
Edited by
HANS JÜRGEN OHLBACH
s
King College, London, United Kingdom
and
UWEREYLE
University 0/ Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany
....
"
SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-94-010-5936-7 ISBN 978-94-011-4574-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-4574-9
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1999
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1999
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
Photograph by Elsbeth Mastenbroek
Reproduced with kind permission
Preface
This volume is dedicated to Dov Gabbay who celebrated his 50th birthday in
October 1995. Dov is one of the most outstanding and most productive researchers
we have ever met. He has exerted a profound influence in major fields of logic,
linguistics and computer science. His contributions in the areas of logic, language
and reasoning are so numerous that a comprehensive survey would already fill half
of this book. Instead of summarizing his work we decided to let him speak for
himself.
Sitting in a car on the way to Amsterdam airport he gave an interview to Jelle
Gerbrandy and Anne-Marie Mineur. This recorded conversation with him, which
is included gives a deep insight into his motivations and into his view of the world,
the Almighty and, of course, the role of logic.
In addition, this volume contains a partially annotated bibliography of his main
papers and books. The length of the bibliography and the broadness of the topics
covered there speaks for itself.
The authors of the papers in this volume are, by far, not all of his close col
leagues and friends. Therefore this book can only be the first in a series of books
dedicated to him. Most of the articles included build on his work and present
results or summarize areas where Dov has made major contributions. The fact
that one cannot avoid having him as coauthor in his own festschrift confirms what
he said in the interview:
"I try to work in these areas in such a way that when, sooner or later,
the roads come together, like on a roundabout, it will be Gabbay com
ing from this way, Gabbay coming from that way ... "
Hans Jiirgen Ohlbach and Uwe Reyle
Vll
Contributions
Dov Gabbay: "I am a logic" 1
Research Themes of Dov Gabbay 13
Proofs, Labels and Dynamics in Natural Language 31
J ohan van Benthem
What a Linguist Might Want From a Logic of MOST and Other 43
Generalized Quantifiers
Hans Kamp
Imperative History: Two-dimensional Executable Temporal Logic 73
Marcelo Finger and Mark Reynolds
Diagrammatic Reasoning in Projective Geometry 99
Philippe Balbiani and Luis Farinas del Cerro
On Sentences of the Kind "Sentence 'p' is About Topic t" 115
Robert Demolombe and Andrew J.I. Jones
Two Traditions in the Logic of Belief: Bringing them Together 135
Krister Segerberg
Elimination of Predicate Quantifiers 149
Andreas Nonnengart, Hans Jiirgen Ohlbach and Andrzej
Szalas
Labelled Natural Deduction 173
Ruy J. G. B. de Queiroz and Dov M. Gabbay
A General Reasoning Scheme for Underspecified Representations 251
Esther Konig and Uwe Reyle
Deductive Systems and Categories in Linguistics 279
Joachim Lambek
Towards a Procedural Model of Natural-language Interpretation 295
Crossover: A Case Study
Ruth Kempson
IX
Transformation Methods in LDS 335
Krysia Broda, Marcello D'A gostino and Alessandra
Russo
Labelled Deduction in the Composition of Form and Meaning 377
Michael Moortgat
Formalisms for Non-formal Languages 401
Julius M. Moravcsik
Names Index 417
Index 422
ix
DOV GABBAY: "I AM A LOGIC"
JELLE GERBRANDY AND ANNE-MARJE MINEUR
An Interview with Dov Gabbayl
Based on the assumption that the Almighty has created a coherent being,
that He has sprinkled a little logic in our minds, Dov M. Gabbay is working
hard on getting theories on language, logic and information to converge.
With that in mind, he publishes handbooks on all kinds of logic, he is an
editor of the Journal of Logic and Computation and he is involved in the
International Society for Pure and Applied Logic. When the roads come
together, he wants to be on every one of them. 'Like a roundabout, it will
be Gabbay coming from this way, Gabbay coming from that way ... ' We had
to accompany him to the airport to have our interview, but then again,
some people deserve the 'Superstar approach '. Gabbay is now working at
Imperial College in London, though officially on sabbatical to study Labelled
Deductive Systems.
Biography - 'This is what I want to do'.
I was born in 1945, and I grew up in Israel. I started my university studies
in '63, I studied mathematics and physics for the BSc, mathematics for the
MSc - I did my Master's on many-valued logics - and then I did my PhD
on non-classical logics, in 1969.
I went to an extremely religious school. Take for example the way they
taught physics. The teacher came to class and said: 'When God created the
world, He used these equations, and then He derived everything from that'.
No experiments, nothing, it was all mathematics. They taught history only
because it was necessary, teaching languages was good, and they taught
(mathematically) some science. Humanities - Arts, Music - they did not
IThis interview is also published in Ta!, the Dutch students' magazine for computa
tional linguistics.
HJ. Ohlbach and U. Reyle (eds.), Logic, Language and Reasoning, 1-12.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
2 JELLE GERBRANDY AND ANNE-MARIE MINEUR
take seriously. And they taught us a lot of Bible. So I naturally became
one-sided, not only in what I knew, but also in my attitude. The school
attitude was: 'Here is the word of God, you concentrate on that. Don't be
distracted by junk'. I don't believe that you have to follow the Bible in
the same way, although I believe it is good to know some things about it.
But the attitude of 'this is what I want to do, don't be distracted', was
ingrained in me.
At that time, this was a good attitude. A lot of my fellow students did
get distracted. I didn't go to discotheques or out dancing with the girls. I
made a concentrated effort. Of course, I could have gone funny at the age
of forty.
A part of the religious teaching was for everyone to get married, have
children, and so forth. I got married in 1970. My wife is an artist, and I
learned a lot from her; the fact that I can talk about things, for instance. I
remember I was going out with her, before we were married, and we were
walking from one part of the university to another part. My objective was
to get from A to B, she wanted to stop and look at the moon, because it
looked very nice. And I thought: 'What the hell would I want to look at
the moon for, when I want to go to B?' Now, of course, I will look at the
moon at all times with her.
Then I went to Stanford, from 1970 to 1974, 1975. In Stanford I took up
Dana Scott's position. When I worked in Stanford, I wanted to become a
professor as fast as possible. I thought that if I worked only in one subject,
intuitionistic logic for example, a large part of the department in Stanford
would not be interacting with me. Then I saw that there was Logic and
Language, and I started working on language with Julius Moravcsik. And
I loved it.
At that time I also used to go to statistics seminars in the other faculty.
Probably, scientifically it was right, because now we have uncertainty, prob
abilistic reasoning and so on, but from the effort point of view, it would
have been too much to do. Then one day Kreisel came to me and said that
G6del wanted to talk to me: 'Come to my office on Sunday'. So I went to
his office on Sunday, and G6del talked to me through Kreisel. It was a very
strange situation: Kreisel was sitting on the phone, talking to G6del in Ger
man, G6del would ask a question, Kreisel would repeat it to me in English,
I would answer, or Kreisel would answer for me. This is how I talked to
G6del. Basically, what G6del said was: 'What is this young Gabbay doing?
He is doing this, he is doing that, what is this? I knew what I was doing
when I was sixteen'. And Kreisel said: 'Well, he's young, he's enthusiastic'.
So I dropped statistics after that, but kept the language, because I was
interested in that. I will get into statistics now, probably. After that, we
decided to go back to Israel. So I resigned and went back to the Bar-Han
University, and I stayed there until 1982. In that year I went for a year to
