Tyler's paper among top ten philosophy papers of 2023

Psychological evidence for restricted quantification.

Congratulations to Tyler Knowlton *21, whose paper in Natural Language Semantics with Paul, Jeff, Alexander and Justin Halberda (JHU), "Psycholinguistic evidence for restricted quantification," has been selected as one of the ten best articles in philosophy for 2023 by The Philosopher's Annual. The paper argues that we do not understand every as it is represented in the currently standard semantics, as a relation between the Fs and either the Gs or the FGs (that is, the Gs among the Fs). Rather we understand it as a unary quantifier over the Gs, restricted to the Fs, a view with ancient precedents. The evidence comes from a suite of studies – carried out by Tyler when he was a student here – suggesting that, when asked to evaluate sentences of the form every F is G, participants mentally group the Fs, but group neither the Gs nor the FGs. The complete abstract is below.

Tyler was an undergraduate student with Justin at Johns Hopkins. He then came here to work with Paul and Jeff, then joined our various groupings of semanticists and psycholinguists, working on the representation, comprehension and acquisition of universal quantification. In 2020 a prelude to the NALS paper, delivered at the 32nd CUNY, earned Tyler the Jerrold J. Katz Young Scholar Award, which "recognizes the paper or poster presented at the Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing that best exhibits the qualities of intellectual rigor, creativity, and independence of thought exemplified in Professor Katz’s life and work." In 2021 Tyler defended his dissertation, co-Chaired by Jeff and Paul, with Justin, Alexander, Valentine and Yi Ting Huang rounding out the committee. Currently he is a MindCORE Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

Psychological evidence for restricted quantification

Quantificational determiners are often said to be devices for expressing relations. For example, the meaning of every is standardly described as the inclusion relation, with a sentence like every frog is green meaning roughly that the green things include the frogs. Here, we consider an older, non-relational alternative: determiners are tools for creating restricted quantifiers. On this view, determiners specify how many elements of a restricted domain (e.g., the frogs) satisfy a given condition (e.g., being green). One important difference concerns how the determiner treats its two grammatical arguments. On the relational view, the arguments are on a logical par as independent terms that specify the two relata. But on the restricted view, the arguments play distinct logical roles: specifying the limited domain versus supplying an additional condition on domain entities. We present psycholinguistic evidence suggesting that the restricted view better describes what speakers know when they know the meaning of a determiner. In particular, we find that when asked to evaluate sentences of the form every F is G, participants mentally group the Fs but not the Gs. Moreover, participants forego representing the group defined by the intersection of F and G. This tells against the idea that speakers understand every F is G as implying that the Fs bear relation (e.g., inclusion) to a second group.