I am professor of Logic and Cognition (with special attention to the analysis of language) at the ILLC (Faculty of Science, the University of Amsterdam). I work on the formal semantics (e.g., generics, comparatives, questions, dynamic semantics) and pragmatics (e.g. conversational implicatures, presuppositions) of natural language, philosophy of language (e.g. propositional attitudes, reference), philosophical logic (e.g. conditionals, vagueness, truth) and cognition (causality, categorisation, decision making, learning, bounded rationality, persuasion). In my research I mainly use logic, (probabilistic) causal models, and decision and (evolutionary) game theory as formal tools.
I studied philosophy (Nijmegen) and linguistics (Tilburg), and I did my PhD at the 'Institute for Natural Language Processing' (IMS) in Stuttgart (1997). Immediately afterwards I started as a post-doc at the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) and never left. I received several local (from the uvA), national (KNAW, NWO) and international (ERS, ESF) grants for my research (see CV) and was a board member of several major (inter)national projects I was involved in (including the AI-oriented Marie Curie ESSENCE project, the philosophy-oriented `Communication and Context'-project, the linguistic-oriented VAAG project, and a project with mostly psycholinguists). I used to be situated at the Department of Philosophy (1997-2013), but since 2013 I work at the Faculty of Science, and teach also on Artificial intelligence. Currently, I am heading the NWO-sponsored Open Competition project 'From Learning to Meaning'
I edited several books (`Vagueness in Communication', 2011; `Language, Games, and Evolution', 2011; `New Perspectives on Games and Interaction', 2007, and `Game Theory and Pragmatic', 2006) and wrote one monograph.
If you want to hear me being interviewed on vagueness, look at the following page: