37 found
Order:
  1. Will done Better: Selection Semantics, Future Credence, and Indeterminacy.Fabrizio Cariani & Paolo Santorio - 2018 - Mind 127 (505):129-165.
    Statements about the future are central in everyday conversation and reasoning. How should we understand their meaning? The received view among philosophers treats will as a tense: in ‘Cynthia will pass her exam’, will shifts the reference time forward. Linguists, however, have produced substantial evidence for the view that will is a modal, on a par with must and would. The different accounts are designed to satisfy different theoretical constraints, apparently pulling in opposite directions. We show that these constraints are (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   49 citations  
  2. ‘Ought’ and Resolution Semantics.Fabrizio Cariani - 2011 - Noûs 47 (3):534-558.
    I motivate and characterize an intensional semantics for ‘ought’ on which it does not behave as a universal quantifier over possibilities. My motivational argument centers on taking at face value some standard challenges to the quantificational semantics, especially to the idea that ‘ought’-sentences satisfy the principle of Inheritance. I argue that standard pragmatic approaches to these puzzles are either not sufficiently detailed or unconvincing.
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   65 citations  
  3. Conditional Heresies.Fabrizio Cariani & Simon Goldstein - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2):251-282.
  4. The Modal Future: A Theory of Future-Directed Thought and Talk.Fabrizio Cariani - 2021 - Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
    Provisional draft, pre-production copy of my book “The Modal Future” (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press).
  5. Deliberative modality under epistemic uncertainty.Fabrizio Cariani, Magdalena Kaufmann & Stefan Kaufmann - 2013 - Linguistics and Philosophy 36 (3):225-259.
    We discuss the semantic significance of a puzzle concerning ‘ought’ and conditionals recently discussed by Kolodny and MacFarlane. We argue that the puzzle is problematic for the standard Kratzer-style analysis of modality. In Kratzer’s semantics, modals are evaluated relative to a pair of conversational backgrounds. We show that there is no sensible way of assigning values to these conversational backgrounds so as to derive all of the intuitions in Kolodny and MacFarlane’s case. We show that the appropriate verdicts can be (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   46 citations  
  6. Deontic Modals and Probability: One Theory to Rule Them All?Fabrizio Cariani - 2016 - In Nate Charlow & Matthew Chrisman (eds.), Deontic Modality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    This paper motivates and develops a novel semantic framework for deontic modals. The framework is designed to shed light on two things: the relationship between deontic modals and substantive theories of practical rationality and the interaction of deontic modals with conditionals, epistemic modals and probability operators. I argue that, in order to model inferential connections between deontic modals and probability operators, we need more structure than is provided by classical intensional theories. In particular, we need probabilistic structure that interacts directly (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  7. Consequence and Contrast in Deontic Semantics.Fabrizio Cariani - 2016 - Journal of Philosophy 113 (8):396-416.
    Contrastivists view ought-sentences as expressing comparisons among alternatives. Deontic actualists believe that the value of each alternative in such a comparison is determined by what would actually happen if that alternative were to be the case. One of the arguments that motivates actualism is a challenge to the principle of agglomeration over conjunction—the principle according to which if you ought to run and you ought to jump, then you ought to run and jump. I argue that there is no way (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  8. Conditionals, Context, and the Suppression Effect.Fabrizio Cariani & Lance J. Rips - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (3):540-589.
    Modus ponens is the argument from premises of the form If A, then B and A to the conclusion B. Nearly all participants agree that the modus ponens conclusion logically follows when the argument appears in this Basic form. However, adding a further premise can lower participants’ rate of agreement—an effect called suppression. We propose a theory of suppression that draws on contemporary ideas about conditional sentences in linguistics and philosophy. Semantically, the theory assumes that people interpret an indicative conditional (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  9. On Predicting.Fabrizio Cariani - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    I propose an account of the speech act of prediction that denies that the contents of prediction must be about the future and illuminates the relation between prediction and assertion. My account is a synthesis of two ideas: (i) that what is in the future in prediction is the time of discovery and (ii) that, as Benton and Turri recently argued, prediction is best characterized in terms of its constitutive norms.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  10.  78
    Review of Patrick Todd's The Open Future.Fabrizio Cariani - 2023 - Philosophical Review 132 (4):650-654.
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  11. Epistemic and Deontic Should.Fabrizio Cariani - 2013 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (1):73-84.
    Probabilistic theories of “should” and “ought” face a predicament. At first blush, it seems that such theories must provide different lexical entries for the epistemic and the deontic interpretations of these modals. I show that there is a new style of premise semantics that can avoid this consequence in an attractively conservative way.
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  12. Confidence Reports.Fabrizio Cariani, Paolo Santorio & Alexis Wellwood - manuscript
    We advocate and develop a states-based semantics for both nominal and adjectival confidence reports, as in "Ann is confident/has confidence that it's raining", and their comparatives "Ann is more confident/has more confidence that it's raining than that it's snowing". Other examples of adjectives that can report confidence include "sure" and "certain". Our account adapts Wellwood's account of adjectival comparatives in which the adjectives denote properties of states, and measure functions are introduced compositionally. We further explore the prospects of applying these (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  13. Local Supermajorities.Fabrizio Cariani - 2016 - Erkenntnis 81 (2):391-406.
    This paper explores two non-standard supermajority rules in the context of judgment aggregation over multiple logically connected issues. These rules set the supermajority threshold in a local, context sensitive way—partly as a function of the input profile of opinions. To motivate the interest of these rules, I prove two results. First, I characterize each rule in terms of a condition I call ‘Block Preservation’. Block preservation says that if a majority of group members accept a judgment set, then so should (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  14. Human Foreknowledge.Fabrizio Cariani - 2021 - Philosophical Perspectives 35 (1):50-69.
    I explore the motivation and logical consequences of the idea that we have some (limited) ability to know contingent facts about the future, even in presence of the assumption that the future is objectively unsettled or indeterminate. I start by formally characterizing skepticism about the future. This analysis nudges the anti-skeptic towards the idea that if some propositions about the future are objectively indeterminate, then it may be indeterminate whether a suitably positioned agent knows them. -/- Philosophical Perspectives, Volume 35, (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  15. 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.
    There has been a recent surge of work on deontic modality within philosophy of language. This work has put the deontic logic tradition in contact with natural language semantics, resulting in significant increase in sophistication on both ends. This chapter surveys the main motivations, achievements, and prospects of this work.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  16. Choice Points for a Modal Theory of Disjunction.Fabrizio Cariani - 2017 - Topoi 36 (1):171-181.
    This paper investigates the prospects for a semantic theory that treats disjunction as a modal operator. Potential motivation for such a theory comes from the way in which modals embed within disjunctions. After reviewing some of the relevant data, I go on to distinguish a variety of modal theories of disjunction. I analyze these theories by considering pairs of conflicting desiderata, highlighting some of the tradeoffs they must face.
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  17. On Stalnaker's "Indicative Conditionals".Fabrizio Cariani - forthcoming - In Louise McNally & Zoltan Szabo (eds.), Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, Vol 100. Springer.
    This paper is a guide to the main ideas and innovations in Robert Stalnaker's "Indicative Conditionals". The paper is for a volume of essays on twenty-one classics of formal semantics edited by Louise McNally and Zoltàn Gendler Szabò.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  18. The Modal Future Hypothesis Debugged.Fabrizio Cariani - manuscript
    This note identifies and corrects some problems in developments of the thesis that predictive expressions, such as English "will", are modals. I contribute a new argument supporting Cariani and Santorio's recent claim that predictive expressions are non-quantificational modals. At the same time, I improve on their selectional semantics by fixing an important bug. Finally, I show that there are benefits to be reaped by integrating the selection semantics framework with standard ideas about the future orientation of modals.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  19. Decision framing in judgment aggregation.Fabrizio Cariani, Marc Pauly & Josh Snyder - 2008 - Synthese 163 (1):1 - 24.
    Judgment aggregation problems are language dependent in that they may be framed in different yet equivalent ways. We formalize this dependence via the notion of translation invariance, adopted from the philosophy of science, and we argue for the normative desirability of translation invariance. We characterize the class of translation invariant aggregation functions in the canonical judgment aggregation model, which requires collective judgments to be complete. Since there are reasonable translation invariant aggregation functions, our result can be viewed as a possibility (...)
    Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  20.  82
    Attitudes, Deontics and Semantic Neutrality.Fabrizio Cariani - 2014 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (4):491-511.
    It has been recently suggested that a semantic theory for deontic modals should be neutral between a very large range of normative and evaluative theories. This article aims to clarify this talk of neutrality, in particular its scope and motivation. My thesis is that neutrality is best understood as an empirical thesis about a fragment of natural language that includes deontic modals – not as a new, sui generis methodological constraint on natural language semantics.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  21. Aggregating with reason.Fabrizio Cariani - 2013 - Synthese 190 (15):3123-3147.
    Judgment aggregation is naturally applied to the modeling of collective attitudes. In the individual case, we represent agents as having not just beliefs, but also as supporting them with reasons. Can the Judgment Aggregation help model a concept of collective reason? I argue that the resources of the standard judgment aggregation framework are insufficiently general. I develop a generalization of the framework that improves along this dimension. In the new framework, new aggregation rules become available, as well as a natural (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  22. Assertion and Modality.Fabrizio Cariani - 2018 - In Sanford C. Goldberg (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Assertion. Oxford University Press. pp. 505-528.
    This essay is an opinionated exploration of the constraints that modal discourse imposes on the theory of assertion. Primary focus is on the question whether modal discourse challenges the traditional view that all assertions have propositional content. This question is tackled largely with reference to discourse involving epistemic modals, although connections with other flavors of modality are noted along the way.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  23. Positive gradable adjective ascriptions without positive morphemes.Fabrizio Cariani, Paolo Santorio & Alexis Wellwood - forthcoming - Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung 2023.
    A long-standing tension in semantic theory concerns the reconciliation of positive gradable adjective (GA) ascriptions and comparative GA ascriptions. Vagueness-based ap- proaches derive the comparative from the positive, and face non-trivial challenges with incommensurability and non-GA comparatives. Classic degree-based approaches effectively derive the positive from the comparative, out of sync with the direction of evidence from morphology, and create some difficulties in accounting for GA scale-mates with differing thresholds (e.g., cold ∼ warm ∼ hot). We propose a new reconciliation that (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  24.  36
    Truth‐Conditional Pragmatics. By Francois Recanati. , £18.99 .).Fabrizio Cariani - 2012 - Philosophical Quarterly 62 (247):415-418.
  25.  21
    Some questions about the problem of the problem of induction.Fabrizio Cariani - 2015 - Episteme 12 (2):291-296.
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  26.  43
    What is a Tense, Anyway?Fabrizio Cariani & Michael Glanzberg - 2023 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 23 (69):349-367.
    We study three different conceptions of tense emerging from semantics, syntax and morphology, respectively. We investigate how they bear on the question of the relationship between tense and modality as they emerge in Cariani’s The Modal Future (2021).
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  27. Future Displacement and Modality.Fabrizio Cariani - manuscript
    In this survey article, I discuss the variety of ways in which language allows us to talk about the future. Topics discussed include how the category of predictive expressions broadly understood relates to the syntactic category of tense; what it means to say that a language does not have tense; how predictiveness relates to modality; and finally technical issue concerning the scope of negation in a semantics that is capable of shifting evaluation towards the future.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  28. Modeling future indeterminacy in possibility semantics.Fabrizio Cariani - manuscript
    Possibility semantics offers an elegant framework for a semantic analysis of modal logic that does not recruit fully determinate entities such as possible worlds. The present papers considers the application of possibility semantics to the modeling of the indeterminacy of the future. Interesting theoretical problems arise in connection to the addition of object-language determinacy operator. We argue that adding a two-dimensional layer to possibility semantics can help solve these problems. The resulting system assigns to the two-dimensional determinacy operator a well-known (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  29. A Context Principle for the Twenty-First Century.Fabrizio Cariani - 2018 - In Annalisa Coliva, Paolo Leonardi & Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds.), Eva Picardi on Language, Analysis and History. Londra, Regno Unito: Palgrave. pp. 183-203.
    Taking a lead from Eva Picardi’s work and influence, I investigate the significance of Frege’s context principle for the philosophy of language. I argue that there are some interpretive problems with recent meta-semantic interpretations of the principle. Instead, I offer a somewhat weaker alternative: the context principle is a tool to license certain definitions. Moreover, I claim that it merely lays out one of many possible ways of licensing a definition. This means, among other things, that despite Frege’s imperative injunctions, (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  30. Normative Indeterminacy in the Epistemic Domain.Nicholas Leonard & Fabrizio Cariani - 2020 - In Scott Stapleford & Kevin McCain (eds.), Epistemic Duties: New Arguments, New Angles. New York: Routledge.
    Building on recent formal work by Aleks Knoks, we explore how the idea that certain epistemic norms may be indeterminate could be implemented in a default logic.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  31. Judgment Aggregation.Fabrizio Cariani - 2011 - Philosophy Compass 6 (1):22-32.
    Judgment aggregation studies how collective opinions arise from the aggregation of individual ones. This article surveys a variety of aggregation rules (possible ways of aggregating individual judgments into collective ones). Aggregation by majority opinion is known to satisfy some but not all the desiderata for an aggregation rule. More general impossibility results show that not all the natural desiderata can be satisfied by a single aggregation rule. To interpret these results, we focus here on some applications of judgment aggregation models (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  32. (1 other version)Intention Reconsideration in Artificial Agents: a Structured Account.Fabrizio Cariani - forthcoming - Special Issue of Phil Studies.
    An important module in the Belief-Desire-Intention architecture for artificial agents (which builds on Michael Bratman's work in the philosophy of action) focuses on the task of intention reconsideration. The theoretical task is to formulate principles governing when an agent ought to undo a prior committed intention and reopen deliberation. Extant proposals for such a principle, if sufficiently detailed, are either too task-specific or too computationally demanding. I propose that an agent ought to reconsider an intention whenever some incompatible prospect is (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  33. Future-Past Asymmetries, Evidential Grounding, and Projection.Fabrizio Cariani - 2022 - Proceedings of the 23rd Amsterdam Colloquium (2022).
    This is the Amsterdam Colloquium version of a paper in which I develop a lexical solution to some important puzzles recently discovered by Dilip Ninan, which highlight striking asymmetries between future- and past-directed talk. A central component of the solution is the idea that lexical meanings of predicates ought to include features that determine the type of evidence that is admissible for standard predications.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  34. Chance, Credence and Circles.Fabrizio Cariani - 2017 - Episteme 14 (1):49-58.
    This is a discussion of Richard Pettigrew's book "Accuracy and the Laws of Credence". I target Pettigrew's application of the accuracy framework to derive chance-credence principles. My principal contention is that Pettigrew's preferred version of the argument might in one sense be circular and, moreover, that Pettigrew's premises have content that go beyond that of standard chance-credence principles.
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  35. Experimenting with (Conditional) Perfection.Fabrizio Cariani & Lance J. Rips - forthcoming - In Stefan Kaufmann, David Over & Ghanshyam Sharma (eds.), Conditionals: Logic, Semantics, Psychology.
    Conditional perfection is the phenomenon in which conditionals are strengthened to biconditionals. In some contexts, “If A, B” is understood as if it meant “A if and only if B.” We present and discuss a series of experiments designed to test one of the most promising pragmatic accounts of conditional perfection. This is the idea that conditional perfection is a form of exhaustification—that is a strengthening to an exhaustive reading, triggered by a question that the conditional answers. If a speaker (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  36. Deontic Logic and Normative Systems.Fabrizio Cariani, Davide Grossi, Joke Meheus & Xavier Parent (eds.) - 2014 - Springer.
  37.  73
    Epistemology in Group Agency: Six objections in search of the truth. [REVIEW]Fabrizio Cariani - 2012 - Episteme 9 (3):255-269.
    List and Pettit's Group Agency is an extremely important book, spearheading a new wave of work on the metaphysics, epistemology and ethics of group agents. In this article, I focus on the epistemological thread in their discussion. After introducing the apparatus they use in analyzing the epistemic performance of groups, I criticize some elements and point to some ways in which the very same apparatus could be redirected to address them.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first (...)
    Direct download (8 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations