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Detaching if-clauses from should

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Abstract

This paper investigates some aspects of the semantics of deontic should-conditionals. The main objective is to understand which actual world facts make deontic statements true. The starting point for the investigation is a famous puzzle known as Chisholm’s Paradox. It is important because making sense of the data in Chisholm-style examples involves arriving at some conclusion regarding the interaction between what we consider ideal and what is actually true. I give an account of how facts affect the evaluation of should formulated in a way that does not predict that the divergence between ideals and facts leads to contradictions. The proposed semantics for should and should-conditionals allows for factual detachment without giving rise to paradoxes. The proposal has several parts: a situation-based semantics for the modal should, a view of the propositions embedded under should that allows aspect to play a crucial role in anchoring propositions to the context set, and a proposal for if-clauses that distinguishes between epistemic if-clauses and if-clauses in the scope of should, treating the latter as restrictors on the quantificational domain of the modal.

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  1. Linguistics Department, University of Ottawa, 70 Laurier Ave., East, Ottawa, ON, K1N6N5, Canada

    Ana Arregui

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Arregui, A. Detaching if-clauses from should . Nat Lang Semantics 18, 241–293 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-010-9055-5

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