Subjunctive Conditionals

Subjunctive Conditionals PDF Author: Michela Ippolito
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262019485
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
A proposal for a compositional semantics for subjunctive (or would) conditionals in English. In this book, Michela Ippolito proposes a compositional semantics for subjunctive (or would) conditionals in English that accounts for their felicity conditions and the constraints on the satisfaction of their presuppositions by capitalizing on the occurrence of past tense morphology in both antecedent and consequent clauses. Very little of the extensive literature on subjunctive conditionals tries to account for the meaning of these sentences compositionally or to relate this meaning to their linguistic form; this book fills that gap, connecting the different lines of research on conditionals. Ippolito's proposal will be of interest both to linguists and to philosophers concerned with conditionals and modality more generally. Ippolito reviews previous analyses of counterfactuals and subjunctive conditionals in the work of David Lewis, Robert Stalnaker, Angelika Kratzer, and others; considers the contrast between future simple past subjunctive conditionals and future past perfect subjunctive conditionals; presents a proposal for subjunctive conditionals that addresses puzzles left unsolved by previous proposals; reviews a number of presupposition triggers showing that they fit the pattern predicted by her proposal; and discusses an asymmetry between the past and the future among subjunctive conditionals, arguing that the best account of our linguistic intuitions must include an indeterministic view of the world.

Subjunctive Conditionals

Subjunctive Conditionals PDF Author: Michela Ippolito
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262019485
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book Here

Book Description
A proposal for a compositional semantics for subjunctive (or would) conditionals in English. In this book, Michela Ippolito proposes a compositional semantics for subjunctive (or would) conditionals in English that accounts for their felicity conditions and the constraints on the satisfaction of their presuppositions by capitalizing on the occurrence of past tense morphology in both antecedent and consequent clauses. Very little of the extensive literature on subjunctive conditionals tries to account for the meaning of these sentences compositionally or to relate this meaning to their linguistic form; this book fills that gap, connecting the different lines of research on conditionals. Ippolito's proposal will be of interest both to linguists and to philosophers concerned with conditionals and modality more generally. Ippolito reviews previous analyses of counterfactuals and subjunctive conditionals in the work of David Lewis, Robert Stalnaker, Angelika Kratzer, and others; considers the contrast between future simple past subjunctive conditionals and future past perfect subjunctive conditionals; presents a proposal for subjunctive conditionals that addresses puzzles left unsolved by previous proposals; reviews a number of presupposition triggers showing that they fit the pattern predicted by her proposal; and discusses an asymmetry between the past and the future among subjunctive conditionals, arguing that the best account of our linguistic intuitions must include an indeterministic view of the world.

A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals

A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals PDF Author: Jonathan Bennett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199258872
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
The author, one of the world's leading authorities on the subject of conditional sentences, distils many years' work and teaching into 'A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals', an authoritative treatment of the subject.

A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals

A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals PDF Author: Jonathan Bennett
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 019153174X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Conditional sentences are among the most intriguing and puzzling features of language: analysis of their meaning and function has important implications for, and uses in, many areas of philosophy. Jonathan Bennett, one of the world's leading experts, distils many years' work and teaching into this Philosophical Guide to Conditionals, the fullest and most authoritative treatment of the subject. The literature on conditionals is difficult - needlessly so. Bennett's treatment is meticulously careful and luminously clear. He presents and evaluates in detail various approaches to the understanding of 'indicative' conditionals (like 'If Shakespeare didn't write Hamlet, some aristocrat did') and 'subjunctive' conditionals (like 'If rabbits had not been deliberately introduced into New Zealand, there would be none there today'); and he offers his own view, which will be recognized as a major original contribution to the subject. Journeying through this intellectual territory brings one into contact with the metaphysics of possible worlds, probability and belief-change, probability and logic, the pragmatics of conversation, determinism, ambiguity, vagueness, the law of excluded middle, facts versus events, and more. One might perhaps learn more philosophy from a thorough study of conditionals than from any other kind of work. Bennett's Guide is an ideal introduction for undergraduates with a philosophical grounding, and will also be a rich source of illumination and stimulation for graduate students and professional philosophers.

Knowledge and Conditionals

Knowledge and Conditionals PDF Author: Robert Stalnaker
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198810342
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Robert C. Stalnaker presents a set of essays on the structure of inquiry. In the first part he focuses on the concepts of knowledge, belief, and partial belief, and on the rules and procedures we use - or ought to use - to determine what to believe, and what to claim that we know. In the second part he examines conditional statements and conditional beliefs, their role in epistemology, and their relations to causal and explanatory concepts, such as dispositions, objective chance, relations of dependence, and independence. A central concern of the book is the interaction of different cognitive perspectives - the ways in which the attitudes of rational agents are or should be influenced by critical reflection on their present cognitive situation, on their own cognitive situations at other times, and on the cognitive situations of others with whom they interact. The general picture that is developed is naturalistic, following Hume in rejecting a substantive role for pure reason in the defense of inductive rules, and in giving causal concepts a central role in the description and explanation of our cognitive practices. However, Stalnaker rejects the side of Hume that aims to reduce concepts involving natural necessity to more basic descriptive concepts. Instead, he argues that the development of inductive rules and practices takes place in interaction with the development of concepts for giving a theoretical description of the world.

Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability

Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability PDF Author: Lee Walters
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198712731
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability comprises fifteen original essays on themes from the work of Dorothy Edgington, the first woman to hold a chair in philosophy at Oxford. Eminent contributors from philosophy and linguistics discuss a range of topics including conditionals, vagueness, knowledge, reasoning, and probability.

Explaining Imagination

Explaining Imagination PDF Author: Peter Langland-Hassan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198815069
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Imagination will remain a mystery--we will not be able to explain imagination--until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis mental state or process--one with its own inscrutable principles of operation. Explaining Imagination upends that view, showing how, on closer inspection, the imaginings at work in hypothetical reasoning, pretense, the enjoyment of fiction, and creativity are reducible to other familiar mental states--judgments, beliefs, desires, and decisions among them. Crisscrossing contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and aesthetics, Explaining Imagination argues that a clearer understanding of imagination is already well within reach.

The Logics of Preference

The Logics of Preference PDF Author: N.J. Moutafakis
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400939752
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
With characteristic incisiveness Georg Henrik von Wright identifies pro haireticIogic (i. e. the logic of preference) as the core of a general theory of value concepts. Essentially, this nucleus involves the logical study of acts from the point of view of their preferability. 1 (italics added) Though the term prohairesis is found in Plato, as well as in Aristotle's treatment of the relations of preference, it is von Wright who introduces this word into contemporary analytical philoso phy, and succinctly specifies the philosophical dimensions it encompasses. The above emphasis upon the philosophical study of the formalization of preferences is a matter of utmost importance for understanding the type of in quiry this investigation attempts to initiate. Over the past one hundred years the literature on general theories of subjective utility has become massive, where one considers the work done in psychometrics, econometrics, statistical theories, probability theories, etc., etc. Histories in these areas are strong in tracing various evolutions in the development of the concept of preference in decision-making. However, what has not been investigated with sustained at tention are the fundamentally philosophical inquiries into the formalization of preference-relations.

Realism and the Correspondence Theory of Truth

Realism and the Correspondence Theory of Truth PDF Author: Richard A. Fumerton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742512832
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Defending a realism about truth, Fumerton (philosophy, U. of Iowa) argues that the most plausible version of realism is the correspondence theory of truth, and that only by including in one's ontology the critical relation of correspondence between truth bearers and truth makers can one avoid an implausible metaphysics of possibilia in a realist analysis of falsehood. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Williamson on Modality

Williamson on Modality PDF Author: Juhani Yli-Vakkuri
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351730053
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Timothy Williamson is one of the most influential living philosophers working in the areas of logic and metaphysics. His work in these areas has been particularly influential in shaping debates about metaphysical modality, which is the topic of his recent provocative and closely-argued book Modal Logic as Metaphysics (2013). This book comprises ten essays by metaphysicians and logicians responding to Williamson’s work on metaphysical modality, as well as replies by Williamson to each essay. In addition, it contains an original essay by Williamson, ‘Modal science,’ concerning the role of modal claims in natural science. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.

Introduction to Formal Philosophy

Introduction to Formal Philosophy PDF Author: Sven Ove Hansson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319774344
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 727

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Book Description
This Undergraduate Textbook introduces key methods and examines the major areas of philosophy in which formal methods play pivotal roles. Coverage begins with a thorough introduction to formalization and to the advantages and pitfalls of formal methods in philosophy. The ensuing chapters show how to use formal methods in a wide range of areas. Throughout, the contributors clarify the relationships and interdependencies between formal and informal notions and constructions. Their main focus is to show how formal treatments of philosophical problems may help us understand them better. Formal methods can be used to solve problems but also to express new philosophical problems that would never have seen the light of day without the expressive power of the formal apparatus. ​Formal philosophy merges work in different areas of philosophy as well as logic, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, physics, psychology, biology, economics, political theory, and sociology. This title offers an accessible introduction to this new interdisciplinary research area to a wide academic audience.