Barbara Partee presented a talk at the Arché 2013 Philosophy of Semantics Workshop May 25-27 at St. Andrews, Scotland (http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/arche/events/event?id=659). Her talk was entitled “The History of Formal Semantic Practice and its Relation to Foundational Problems”. Barbara writes that the workshop seemed designed to probe controversial foundational issues, and she had been looking forward to it with a mix of eagerness and trepidation. (Her own talk discused some of those issues but at the same time agrees with the last page of the Heim and Kratzer textbook: linguists know, and sometimes care, about issues at the foundation of formal semantics, but worrying about them mostly doesn’t get in the way of “doing” formal semantics. Linguists qua linguists tend to be instrumentalists and tend to appreciate any theory that helps to give good explanations of linguistic phenomena.)
