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Re: Linear logic semantics (Barwise)

Date: Tue, 25 Feb 92 12:45:01 -0500
To: linear@cs.stanford.edu

"May you live in exciting times" goes the old curse.

I found Vaughan message extremely interesting.  That is to say, I
found it helpful, exciting, and daunting, all at once.
- - - -Helpful because it really gives me a way to think about linear logic
that I can understand.
- - - -Exciting because it does indeed point to genuine connections between
his view of LL and work in situation theory (ST) on information flow,
espcially recent work information flow and constraints to information
channels.
- - - -Daunting because it shows I really do have to understand the
work in linear logic in order to continue what I have been up to.
(Vaughan, you should have to go read linguistics, philosophy of language,
and philosophy of mind for a few years to make it fair.) 

Knowing Vaughan, I can't help suspecting that the semantic view of LL
he expressed is his own slant on things.  Or is it standard?  In any
case, I like it. It really makes sense to me, most of it, anyway.  It
convinces me that LL and ST, while starting with quite different
concerns and motivations, are indeed arriving at very similar places.
(This is not to suggest that anything like the technical work in the
logic of ST has been done. The efforts have gone in complinetary
directions, perhaps.)  Whether the ST perspective will prove useful to
LL or not, I don't know. At the very least, it should be interesting
to the LL community that an approach motivated by problems of natural
language and mind came to such a similar view of information flow.  It
is certainly interesting to me in the opposite direction.

If anyone is interested in seeing a paper in situation theory where
the parallels with Vaughan message are pretty obvious, I have a draft
of a paper you could ftp from phil.indiana.edu: anonymous ftp to the
directory ~ftp/pub.  The paper is in latex and is Barwise-STA3.tex.

Thanks for the effort, Vaughan!  

Jon