Formal semantics

Branch of philosophy concerned with the assigning of precise interpretations to expressions in artificial systems of mathematics or logic. Thus especially, in the philosophy of science in the mid-20th century, in accounts of scientific theories, conceived as calculi interpreted with respect to some empirical domain. Thence, in linguistics, of a similar interpretation of languages, on the assumption, due originally to Montague Grammar in particular, that it is illuminating to represent them, at a sufficient level of abstraction from the phenomena of speech, as systems of the same kind.