Linguist Irene Heim '83PhD Wins Prestigious Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy

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Linguist and alumna Irene Heim 82'PhD is the co-recipient of the 2024 Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy. The award, sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize of philosophy according to the Daily Nous, celebrates the “conception and early development of dynamic semantics for natural language.”

Heim, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receives the award with Hans Kamp, a former UMass Amherst faculty member who was part of the Department of Philosophy from 1982-84. Kamp is now professor of formal logics and philosophy of language at the University of Stuttgart. 

A press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences goes on to explain:

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.

Heim was born in Germany in 1954. She received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1982 and has been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA since 1997.