Detaching if-clauses from should
Natural Language Semantics 18 (3):241-293 (2010)
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 modalDOI
10.1007/s11050-010-9055-5
My notes
Similar books and articles
When aspect matters: the case of would-conditionals. [REVIEW]Ana Arregui - 2007 - Natural Language Semantics 15 (3):221-264.
A Paraconsistentist Approach to Chisholm's Paradox.Marcelo Esteban Coniglio & Newton Marques Peron - 2009 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 13 (3):299-326.
Counterfactual-Style Revisions in the Semantics of Deontic Modals.Ana Arregui - 2011 - Journal of Semantics 28 (2):171-210.
Sorting out Relative Clauses.Sarah Hulsey & Uli Sauerland - 2006 - Natural Language Semantics 14 (2):111-137.
Towards a Radically Pragmatic Theory of If-Conditionals.Gunnar Björnsson - 2011 - In K. P. Turner (ed.), Making Semantics Pragmatic (CRiSPI, Vol. 24). Emerald.
Reasoning with deontic and counterfactual conditionals.Ana Cristina Quelhas & Ruth Byrne - 2003 - Thinking and Reasoning 9 (1):43 – 65.
Two dimensional Standard Deontic Logic [including a detailed analysis of the 1985 Jones–Pörn deontic logic system].Mathijs Boer, Dov M. Gabbay, Xavier Parent & Marija Slavkovic - 2012 - Synthese 187 (2):623-660.
Analytics
Added to PP
2013-12-01
Downloads
101 (#124,542)
6 months
3 (#227,001)
2013-12-01
Downloads
101 (#124,542)
6 months
3 (#227,001)
Historical graph of downloads
Citations of this work
Weak and Strong Necessity Modals: On Linguistic Means of Expressing "A Primitive Concept OUGHT".Alex Silk - 2022 - In Billy Dunaway & David Plunkett (eds.), Meaning, Decision, and Norms: Themes from the Work of Allan Gibbard. pp. 203-245.
Deontic Logic and Natural Language.Fabrizio Cariani - forthcoming - In Dov Gabbay, Ron van der Meyden, John Horty, Xavier Parent & Leandert van der Torre (eds.), The Handbook of Deontic Logic (Vol. II). College Publications.
On Necessity and Comparison.Aynat Rubinstein - 2014 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (4):512-554.
Preference‐Conditioned Necessities: Detachment and Practical Reasoning.Sven Lauer & Cleo Condoravdi - 2014 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (4):584-621.