Lorsqu’un confrère atmocien publie un article, nous ne manquons pas de le signaler ; et lorsque par surcroît l’article en question paraît dans une revue aussi prestigieuse que Synthese, nous sommes d’autant plus heureux d’en publier une version sur le site de l’ATMOC. Son auteur est Thibaut Giraud, qui a présenté les premiers linéaments de ce travail lors d’une séance de l’atelier l’an dernier. Vous pourrez donc retrouver « Constructing Formal Semantics from an Ontological Perspective. The Case of Second-Order Logics. » dans la rubrique Publications.

En voici le résumé :
« In a first part, I defend that formal semantics can be used as a guide to ontological commitment. Thus, if one endorses an ontological view O and wants to interpret a formal language L, a thorough understanding of the relation between semantics and ontology will help us to construct a semantics for L in such a way that its ontological commitment will be in perfect accordance with O. Basically, that is what I call constructing formal semantics from an ontological perspective. In the rest of the paper, I develop rigorously and put into practice such a method, especially concerning the interpretation of second-order quantification.
I will define the notion of ontological framework: it is a set-theoretical structure from which one can construct semantics whose ontological commitments correspond exactly to a given ontological view. I will define five ontological frameworks corresponding respectively to: (i) predicate nominalism, (ii) resemblance nominalism, (iii) armstrongian realism, (iv) platonic realism, and (v) tropism.
In those different frameworks, I will construct different semantics for first-order and second-order languages. Notably I will present different kinds of nominalist semantics for second-order languages, thus showing how we can quantify over properties and relations while being ontologically committed only to individuals. More generally I will show in what extent those semantics differ from each other; it will make clear how the disagreements between the ontological views extend from ontology to logic, and how metaphysical questions can be correctly treated, in those semantics, as simple questions of logic. »

L’article a été publié dans Synthese, volume 190, n°18 (déc. 2013), pp. 1-31 (DOI : 10.1007/s11229-013-0387-9) :
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-013-0387-9