Last Monday I stayed up all night writing, working on several different projects, among them some remarks on formalism from 1998 that I had disinterred exactly a year ago and was turning into a paper on formalism in December 2022. I didn’t go to bed until after 7:00 am, but that’s okay as my head was quite full of ideas, and I could have just kept going. There is probably nothing else that gives me as much pleasure as a thought experiment, and hitting upon a new thought experiment is always a source of enjoyment, especially when new aspects of the thought experiment unfold the more one thinks about it. During my sleepless night an odd counterfactual occurred to me, which suggested a thought experiment.
Formal semantics with as little math as possible
I was writing something up about presuppositions when I realized that I really wanted to be able to write things somewhat formally. So for…