The denotational semantics for programming languages was originally developed by the American logician Dana Scott and the British computer scientist Christopher Strachey. It can be described as an application of the semantics to computer languages that Scott had developed for the logical systems known as lambda calculus. The characteristic feature of this calculus is that in it one can highlight a variable, say x, in an expression, say M, and understand the result as a function of x. This function is expressed by (λx,M), and it can be applied to other functions.

The semantics for lambda calculus does not postulate any individuals to which the functions it deals with are applied. Everything is function, and, when one function is applied to another function, the result is again a function.

Hypothetical and counterfactual reasoning

Hypothetical reasoning is often presented as an extension and application of logic. One of the starting points of the study of such reasoning is the observation that the conditional sentences of natural languages do not have a truth-conditional semantics. In traditional logic, the conditional “If A, then B” is true unless A is true and B is false. However, in ordinary discourse, counterfactual conditionals (conditionals whose antecedent is false) are not always considered true.

The study of conditionals faces two interrelated problems: stating the conditions in which counterfactual conditionals are true and representing the conditional connection between the antecedent and the consequent. The difficulty of the first problem is illustrated by the following pair of counterfactual conditionals:

If Los Angeles were in Massachusetts, it would not be on the Pacific Ocean. If Los Angeles were in Massachusetts, Massachusetts would extend all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

Both of these conditionals cannot be true, but it is not clear how to decide between them. The example nevertheless suggests a perspective on counterfactuals. Often the counterfactual situation is allowed to differ from the actual one only in certain respects. Thus, the first example would be true if state boundaries were kept fixed and Los Angeles were allowed to change its location, whereas the latter would be true if cities were kept fixed but state boundaries could change. It is not obvious how this relativity to certain implicit constancy assumptions can be represented formally.

Other criteria for the truth of counterfactuals have been suggested, often within the framework of possible-worlds semantics. For example, the American philosopher David Lewis suggested that a counterfactual is true if and only if it is true in the possible world that is maximally similar to the actual one.

The idea of conditionality suggests that the way in which the antecedent is made true must somehow also make the consequent true. This idea is most naturally implemented in game-theoretic semantics. In this approach, the verification game with a conditional “If A, then B” can be divided into two subgames, played with A and B, respectively. If A turns out to be true, it means that there exists a verifying strategy in the game with A. The conditionality of B on A is thus implemented by assuming that this winning strategy is available to the verifier in the game with the consequent B. This interpretation agrees with evidence from natural languages in the form of the behaviour of anaphoric pronouns. Thus, the availability of the winning strategy in the game with B means that the names of certain objects imported by the strategy from the first subgame are available as heads of anaphoric pronouns in the second subgame. For example, consider the sentence “If you give a gift to each child for her birthday, some child will open it today.” Here a verifying strategy in the game with “you give a gift to each child for her birthday” involves a function that assigns a gift to each child. Since this function is known when the consequent is dealt with, it assigns to some child her gift as the value of “it.” In the usual logics of conditional reasoning, these two questions are answered indirectly, by postulating logical laws that conditionals are supposed to obey.

Fuzzy logic and the paradoxes of vagueness

Certain computational methods for dealing with concepts that are not inherently imprecise are known as fuzzy logics. They were originally developed by the American computer scientist Lotfi Zadeh. Fuzzy logics are widely discussed and used by computer scientists. Fuzzy logic is more of a rival to classical probability calculus, which also deals with imprecise attributions of properties to objects, than a rival to classical logic calculus. The largely unacknowledged reason for the popularity of fuzzy logic is that, unlike probabilistic methods, fuzzy logic relies on compositional methods—i.e., methods in which the logical status of a complex expression depends only on the status of its component expressions. This facilitates computational applications, but it deprives fuzzy logic of most of its theoretical interest.

On the philosophical level, fuzzy logic does not make logical problems of vagueness more tractable. Some of these problems are among the oldest conceptual puzzles. Among them is the sorites paradox, sometimes formulated in the form known as the paradox of the bald man. The paradox is this: A man with no hairs is bald, and if he has n hairs, then adding one single hair will not make a difference to his baldness. Therefore, by mathematical induction, a man of any number of hairs is bald. Everybody is bald. One natural attempt to solve this paradox is to assume that the predicate “bald” is not always applicable, so that it leaves what are known as truth-value gaps. But the boundaries of these gaps must again be sharp, reproducing the paradox. However, the sorites paradox can be solved if the assumption of truth-value gaps is combined with the use of a suitable noncompositional logic.