Online research in philosophy

The goal of this paper is to offer a compositional semantics for subjunctive and indicative will conditionals, and to derive the projection properties of the types of conditionals we consider and in particular those of counterfactual conditionals. It is argued that subjunctive conditionals are "bare" conditional embedded under temporal and aspectural operators, which constrain the interpretation of the modal operators in the embedded conditional. Furthermore, it is argued that a theory of presupposition projection à la Heim together with the present proposal about their logical form explains the projection facts.

It is generally agreed that constructions of the form “if P, Q” are capable of conveying a number of different relations between antecedent and consequent, with pragmatics playing a central role in determining these relations. Controversy concerns what the conventional contribution of the if-clause is, how it constrains the pragmatic processes, and what those processes are. In this essay, I begin to argue that the conventional contribution of if-clauses to semantics is exhausted by the fact that these clauses introduce a proposition without presenting it as true so that the consequent can be understood in relation to it. Given our cognitive interests in such non-truth-presentational introductions, conditionals will make salient the wide but nevertheless disciplined variety of contents that we naturally attribute to them; no further substantial constraints of the sorts proposed by standard theories of conditionals are needed to explain the phenomena. If this is correct, it provides prima facie evidence for a radically contextualist account of conditionals according to which conditionals have no truth-evaluable or intuitively complete content absent some contextually provided, sufficiently salient relation between antecedent and consequent.

I accept that 1 and 2 differ in truth-value, but see no reason why this requires two types of conditionals. Rather, the difference between 1 and 2 seems to me to be a difference in the antecedent and consequent conditions, flanking one and the same conditional. That is, I hold that the difference between 1 and 2 should not be thought of as per the schema: 1a. p C1 q 2a. p C2 q where C1 and C2 are two different types of conditionals. The difference is better conceived via the schema: 1b. p1 C q1 2b. p2 C q2 which features a single type of conditional C flanked by different antecedent and consequent conditions: indicative and subjunctive conditions, respectively.

This collection introduces the reader to some of the most interesting current work on conditionals. Particular attention is paid to possible world semantics for conditionals, the role of conditional probability in helping us to understand conditionals, implicature and the material conditional, and subjunctive versus indicative conditionals. Contributors include V.H. Dudman, Dorothy Edgington, Nelson Goodman, H.P. Grice, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker.

This note relates the Lewis/Kratzer view of conditionals as restrictors to the philosophical debate over the meaning of conditionals.

This paper develops an interpretation of the fourth account of conditionals in Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism that conceptually links it with contemporary ?relevance? interpretations of entailment. It is argued that the third account of conditionals, which analyzes the truth of a conditional in terms of the joint impossibility of antecedent and denial of consequent, should not be interpreted in terms of a relative incompatibility of antecedent and denial of consequent because of Stoic acceptance of the truth of some conditionals of the form p ? ?p and its converse. Rather, it is suggested, ancient attempts to avoid the so-called paradoxes of implication involve the fourth account of conditionals. I hypothesize that this account is related to Stoic attempts to define truth conditions for conditionals in terms of a theory of the concludency (validity) of arguments in opposition to the more common procedure (represented by the first three accounts of conditionals) of specifying truth conditions for conditionals ?semantically? and using those truth conditions in the development of a theory of argument validity.

Attitude reports are reports about people’s states of mind. They are reports about what people think, believe, know, know a priori, imagine, hate, wish, fear, and the like. So, for example, I might report that s knows p, or that she imagines p, or that she hates p, where p specifies the content to which s is purportedly related. One lively current debate centers around the question of what sort of specification is involved when such attitude reports are successful. Some hold that it is specification of the precise content of a mental state; others hold that it is specification of the content of a mental state only relative to a mode of presentation; yet others hold that it is merely a description or characterization of the content of a mental state. After providing a brief introduction to the traditional debate on attitude reports, this entry argues that for certain kinds of knowledge reports and for so-called de re attitude reports, descriptive theories emerge as the most plausible. The entry concludes with a discussion of how the characterizing relation between attitude reports and mental states might be construed.

The benchmark theory of conditionals maintains that conditionals quantify over a contextually restricted domain of worlds (Kratzer 1991). They are modal statements. The antecedent contributes to the interpretation of the whole conditional a proposition, a set of worlds. Conditionals quantify over a contextually restricted domain of worlds in which the proposition that the antecedent expresses is true. This is all antecedents do. In particular, the semantic import of its tense and mood inflection is neglected: it is - at most - a merely formal reflection of the type of modal in the consequent (Fintel 1998; Heim 1992; Kratzer 1991).

In English, reference to time in discourse involves a grammatical system of tense markers interpreted as temporal anaphors (Reichenbach 1947, Partee 1973, Webber 1988, a.o.). Recently, it has been argued that reference to hypothetical worlds in conditionals involves a parallel grammatical system of modal axiliaries interpreted as modal anaphors (Stone 1997, Stone and Hardt 1999, Brasoveanu 2007, a.o.). Based on evidence from Kalaallisut (Eskaleut: Greenland), this paper argues that temporal and modal discourse anaphora can be just as precise in a language that does not have either anaphoric tenses or anaphoric modals. Bittner (2005) shows that future uses of the English modals will and would have many translation equivalents in Kalaallisut. Most of these are derivational suffixes for prospectoriented attitudinal states, e.g., expectation (-ssa, -jumaar), desire (-ssa, -rusuk, -juma), intent (-niar, -jumaar), need (-tariaqar), anxiety (-qina), considering the prospect possible (-sinnaa), impossible (-navianngit), etc. Instead of grammatical tense, the language has a grammatical system of mood inflections that distinguish currently verifiable facts (in the declarative, interrogative, or factual mood) from current prospects (in the imperative, optative, or hypothetical mood). In this system futurity is a species of a fact. For example, the English future Ole will win translates into (1)2, which asserts (-pu ‘DECT’) that there is a real and current state of expectation (-ssa ‘exp>’) that Ann (topic, ) will win. The Kalaallisut attitudinal predicate -ssa ‘-exp>’ is impersonal, so the attitude holder is unspecified.

Typologically distant languages may conceptualize similar meanings in fundamentally different ways. The tenseless language Kalaallisut (Eskimo-Aleut: Greenland) builds on its conception of futurity as a real attitude to a prospect (Bittner 2005) to express counterfactuals as real attitudes to unrealized prospects. In this paper the resulting FACTUAL COUNTERFACTUALS are described and analyzed in a formally precise framework for directly compositional incremental update (building on Bittner 2007 and Dekker 1994). Their counterfactual meaning is shown to be an automatic consequence of independently motivated analyses of four key ingredients: fact-oriented mood (Stalnaker 1978, Bittner 2008), attitudes de se (Lewis 1979, Heim 1992, Bittner 2005, 2007), conditionals (Lewis 1973, 1981, Kratzer 1981), and remote modality (Stone 1997, Stone and Hardt 1999).