Johan Anthony Willem "Hans" Kamp (born 5 September 1940) is a Dutch philosopher and

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

, responsible for introducing

discourse representation theory In formal linguistics, discourse representation theory (DRT) is a framework for exploring meaning under a formal semantics approach. One of the main differences between DRT-style approaches and traditional Montagovian approaches is that DRT inc ...

(DRT) in 1981.

Biography

Kamp was born in

Den Burg Den Burg is a town in the Dutch province of North Holland. It is a part of the municipality of Texel on the island of the same name, and lies about 12 km north of Den Helder. Overview Located in the middle of the island, Den Burg is the lar ...

. He received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UCLA in 1968, and has taught at

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a collegiate university, federal Public university, public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The ...

University of Texas, Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 students as of fall 20 ...

, and

University of Stuttgart The University of Stuttgart () is a research university located in Stuttgart, Germany. It was founded in 1829 and is organized into 10 faculties. It is one of the oldest technical universities in Germany with programs in civil, mechanical, ind ...

. His dissertation, ''Tense Logic and the Theory of Linear Order'' (1968) was devoted to

functional completeness In Mathematical logic, logic, a functionally complete set of logical connectives or Boolean function, Boolean operators is one that can be used to express all possible truth tables by combining members of the Set (mathematics), set into a Boolean ...

tense logic In logic, temporal logic is any system of rules and symbolism for representing, and reasoning about, propositions qualified in terms of time (for example, "I am ''always'' hungry", "I will ''eventually'' be hungry", or "I will be hungry ''until'' I ...

, the main result being that all temporal operators are definable in terms of "since" and "until", provided that the underlying temporal structure is a continuous

linear ordering In mathematics, a total order or linear order is a partial order in which any two elements are comparable. That is, a total order is a binary relation \leq on some set X, which satisfies the following for all a, b and c in X: # a \leq a ( ref ...

. Kamp's 1971 paper on "now" (published in ''

Theoria Christian mysticism is the tradition of mysticism, mystical practices and mystical theology within Christianity which "concerns the preparation f the personfor, the consciousness of, and the effect of ..a direct and transformative pr ...

'') was the first employment of double-indexing in model theoretic

semantics Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

. His doctoral committee included

Richard Montague 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 th ...

as chairman,

Chen Chung Chang Chen Chung Chang () was a mathematician who worked in model theory. He obtained his PhD from Berkeley in 1955 on "Cardinal and Ordinal Factorization of Relation Types" under Alfred Tarski. He wrote the standard text on model theory. Chang's co ...

, David Kaplan, Yiannis N. Moschovakis, and

Jordan Howard Sobel Jordan Howard Sobel (22 September 1929 – 26 March 2010) was a Canadian-American philosopher specializing in ethics, logic, and decision theory. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, Canada. In addition to his areas of s ...

. Kamp became a corresponding member of the

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (, KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed in the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam. In addition to various advisory a ...

in 1997. He was awarded the

Jean Nicod Prize The Jean Nicod Prize is awarded annually in Paris to a leading philosopher of mind or philosophically oriented cognitive scientist. The lectures are organized by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique as part of its effort to promote int ...

in 1996 and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2015. In 2024 he was awarded the

Rolf Schock Prize The Rolf Schock Prizes were established and endowed by bequest of philosopher and artist Rolf Schock (1933–1986). The prizes were first awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1993 and, since 2005, are awarded every three years. It is sometimes conside ...

jointly with

Irene Heim Irene Roswitha Heim (born October 30, 1954) is a linguist and a leading specialist in semantics. She was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and UCLA before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989, where she is Pr ...

.Rolf Schock Prize 2024
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Publications

* Kamp, Hans
'A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation'.
In J. Groenendijk and others (eds.). ''Formal Methods in the Study of Language''. Amsterdam: Mathematics Center, 1981. * Kamp, Hans and Uwe Reyle
`From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to Modeltheoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory'.
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.

References

1940 births Living people People from Texel Linguists from the Netherlands 20th-century Dutch philosophers Semanticists Jean Nicod Prize laureates Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences University of California, Los Angeles alumni Academic staff of the University of Stuttgart {{Netherlands-linguist-stub

Biography

Publications

See also

References