Richard Montague facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Richard Montague
|
|
|---|---|
Richard Montague, at UCLA, c. 1967
|
|
| Born | September 20, 1930 |
| Died | March 7, 1971 (aged 40) |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy |
| Institutions | University of California, Los Angeles |
| Thesis | Contributions to the Axiomatic Foundations of Set Theory (1957) |
| Doctoral advisor | Alfred Tarski |
| Doctoral students | Nino Cocchiarella Hans Kamp |
|
Main interests
|
Mathematics (axiomatic set theory, model theory), philosophical logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language |
|
Notable ideas
|
Formal semantics, Montague grammar |
Richard Merritt Montague (September 20, 1930 – March 7, 1971) was an American mathematician and philosopher who made contributions to mathematical logic and the philosophy of language. He is known for proposing Montague grammar to formalize the semantics of natural language. As a student of Alfred Tarski, he also contributed early developments to axiomatic set theory (ZFC). For the latter half of his life, he was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles until his early death at age 40.
Career
At the University of California, Berkeley, Montague earned a BA in philosophy in 1950, an MA in mathematics in 1953, and a PhD in Philosophy in 1957, the latter under the direction of the mathematician and logician Alfred Tarski. Montague spent his entire career teaching in the UCLA Department of Philosophy, where he supervised the dissertations of Nino Cocchiarella and Hans Kamp.
Montague wrote on the foundations of logic and set theory, as would befit a student of Tarski. His PhD dissertation, titled Contributions to the Axiomatic Foundations of Set Theory, contained the first proof that all possible axiomatizations of the standard axiomatic set theory ZFC must contain infinitely many axioms. In other words, ZFC cannot be finitely axiomatized.
He pioneered a logical approach to natural language semantics that became known as Montague grammar. This approach to language has been especially influential among certain computational linguists—perhaps more so than among more traditional philosophers of language. In particular, Montague's influence lives on in grammar approaches like categorial grammar (such as Unification Categorial Grammar, Left-Associative Grammar, or Combinatory Categorial Grammar), which attempt a derivation of syntactic and semantic representation in tandem and the semantics of quantifiers, scope and discourse (Hans Kamp, a student of Montague's, co-developed Discourse Representation Theory).
Montague was an accomplished organist and a successful real estate investor. He died violently in his own home; the crime is unsolved to this day.
See also
- American philosophy
- List of American philosophers
- List of unsolved murders
