Solving Partee's Temperature Puzzle in an EFL-Ontology

ABSTRACT. According to the received view of type-logical semantics (suggested by Montague and adopted by many of his successors), the number of a semantics' basic types depends proportionally on the syntactic and lexical diversity of the modeled natural language fragment. This paper provides a counterexample to this principle. In particular, it shows that Partee's temperature puzzle from [PTQ] – whose solution is commonly taken to require a basic type for indices (for the formation of individual concepts) or for individual concepts – can be solved in the poorer type system from [EFL], which only assumes basic individuals and propositions. This result contributes to the general project of identifying the minimal semantic requirements on models for certain linguistic fragments.