The Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy, sometimes referred to as the “Nobel Prize” of philosophy, was jointly awarded this year to Hans Kamp, professor of formal logics and philosophy of language at the University of Stuttgart, and Irene Heim, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

They received the prize particularly “for (mutually independent) conception and early development of dynamic semantics for natural language.”

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Schock Foundation award the prize. They write:

Natural languages are highly context-dependent—how a sentence is interpreted often depends on the situation, but also on what has been uttered before. In one type of case, a pronoun depends on an earlier phrase in a separate clause. In the mid-1970s, some constructions of this type posed a hard problem for formal semantic theory.

Around 1980, Hans Kamp and Irene Heim each separately developed very similar solutions to this problem. Their theories brought far-reaching changes in the field. Both introduced a new level of representation between the linguistic expression and its worldly interpretation and, in both, this level has a new type of linguistic meaning. Instead of the traditional idea that a clause describes a worldly condition, meaning at this level consists in the way it contributes to updating information. Based on these fundamentally new ideas, the theories provide adequate interpretations of the problematic constructions.

The prize is 600,000 Swedish kronor (approximately $58,000), which will be split between the two winners.

You can learn more about the Schock Prizes here and see a list of previous winners here.

NOTE: The prize amount was incorrectly stated as 400,000 SEK in the original version of this post. It has now been corrected.