Serial Composition and Fusion

Andrew Tedder (University of Connecticut)

Andrew Tedder (UConn) will give a talk titled "Serial Composition and Fusion". 

Abstract: The channel-theoretic interpretation of the ternary relation, as developed by Restall (1994) following the lead of Barwise (1993), provides an analysis the ternary relation in terms of situations, and systematic connections between these. The focus of this talk is on a feature of Restall's approach -- namely, of employing some of Barwise's machinery regarding how channels may be (serially) composed as a way to gain some insight into how some conditional information may be applied to some input (signal) in order to get to an output (target). This notion of application features in many interpretations of the Routley-Meyer semantic framework, and provides a fairly natural starting point to analysing the the object language conditional as the residual of fusion. The point of this talk shall be to provide some reasons to differentiate these two notions (composition and application), and to motivate taking something more like Barwise's original approach. In service of this end, we present some results about adding a kind of composition to the Routley-Meyer semantics for B, and some of its neighbours.