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  1. Conditionals, Causality and Conditional Probability.Robert van Rooij & Katrin Schulz - 2018 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 28 (1):55-71.
    The appropriateness, or acceptability, of a conditional does not just ‘go with’ the corresponding conditional probability. A condition of dependence is required as well. In this paper a particular notion of dependence is proposed. It is shown that under both a forward causal and a backward evidential reading of the conditional, this appropriateness condition reduces to conditional probability under some natural circumstances. Because this is in particular the case for the so-called diagnostic reading of the conditional, this analysis might help (...)
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  • Semantics with Assignment Variables.Alex Silk - 2021 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    This book combines insights from philosophy and linguistics to develop a novel framework for theorizing about linguistic meaning and the role of context in interpretation. A key innovation is to introduce explicit representations of context — assignment variables — in the syntax and semantics of natural language. The proposed theory systematizes a spectrum of “shifting” phenomena in which the context relevant for interpreting certain expressions depends on features of the linguistic environment. Central applications include local and nonlocal contextual dependencies with (...)
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  • Policy Externalism.Daniel Drucker - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (2):261-285.
    I develop and argue for a kind of externalism about certain kinds of non-doxastic attitudes that I call policy externalism. Policy externalism about a given type of attitude is the view that all the reasonable policies for having attitudes of that type will not involve the agent's beliefs that some relevant conditions obtain. My defense primarily involves attitudes like hatred, regret, and admiration, and has two parts: a direct deductive argument and an indirect linguistic argument, an inference to the best (...)
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  • Conditionals as Definite Descriptions.Schlenker Philippe - unknown
    Lewis 1973 observed that his logic for counterfactuals could be applied to definite descriptions. His generalization was that the latter display the same non-monotonic patterns as the former, contrary to what Russellian or Strawsonian accounts would predict. We take Lewis's suggestion literally and suggest that ‘if' should be analyzed as the word ‘the' applied to a description of possible worlds. We do not follow Lewis's own implementation, however, for it entails that definite descriptions do not refer. Rather, we use von (...)
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  • What 'If'?William B. Starr - 2014 - Philosophers' Imprint 14.
    No existing conditional semantics captures the dual role of 'if' in embedded interrogatives — 'X wonders if p' — and conditionals. This paper presses the importance and extent of this challenge, linking it to cross-linguistic patterns and other phenomena involving conditionals. Among these other phenomena are conditionals with multiple 'if'-clauses in the antecedent — 'if p and if q, then r' — and relevance conditionals — 'if you are hungry, there is food in the cupboard'. Both phenomena are shown to (...)
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  • Certain Verbs Are Syntactically Explicit Quantifiers.Anna Szabolcsi - 2011 - The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 6:5.
    Quantification over individuals, times, and worlds can in principle be made explicit in the syntax of the object language, or left to the semantics and spelled out in the meta-language. The traditional view is that quantification over individuals is syntactically explicit, whereas quantification over times and worlds is not. But a growing body of literature proposes a uniform treatment. This paper examines the scopal interaction of aspectual raising verbs (begin), modals (can), and intensional raising verbs (threaten) with quantificational subjects in (...)
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  • Williamson on Indicatives and Suppositional Heuristics.Franz Berto - 2022 - Synthese (1):1-12.
    Timothy Williamson has defended the claim that the semantics of the indicative ‘if’ is given by the material conditional. Putative counterexamples can be handled by better understanding the role played in our assessment of indicatives by a fallible cognitive heuristic, called the Suppositional Procedure. Williamson’s Suppositional Conjecture has it that the Suppositional Procedure is humans’ primary way of prospectively assessing conditionals. This paper raises some doubts on the Suppositional Procedure and Conjecture.
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  • Meaning-preserving contraposition of conditionals.Gilberto Gomes - 2019 - Journal of Pragmatics 1 (152):46-60.
    It is argued that contraposition is valid for a class of natural language conditionals, if some modifications are allowed to preserve the meaning of the original conditional. In many cases, implicit temporal indices must be considered, making a change in verb tense necessary. A suitable contrapositive for implicative counterfactual conditionals can also usually be found. In some cases, the addition of certain words is necessary to preserve meaning that is present in the original sentence and would be lost or changed (...)
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  • The Dialogical Entailment Task.Niels Skovgaard-Olsen - 2019 - Cognition (C):104010.
    In this paper, a critical discussion is made of the role of entailments in the so-called New Paradigm of psychology of reasoning based on Bayesian models of rationality (Elqayam & Over, 2013). It is argued that assessments of probabilistic coherence cannot stand on their own, but that they need to be integrated with empirical studies of intuitive entailment judgments. This need is motivated not just by the requirements of probability theory itself, but also by a need to enhance the interdisciplinary (...)
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  • Perspectival Plurality, Relativism, and Multiple Indexing.Dan Zeman - 2018 - In Rob Truswell, Chris Cummins, Caroline Heycock, Brian Rabern & Hannah Rohde (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21. Semantics Archives. pp. 1353-1370.
    In this paper I focus on a recently discussed phenomenon illustrated by sentences containing predicates of taste: the phenomenon of " perspectival plurality " , whereby sentences containing two or more predicates of taste have readings according to which each predicate pertains to a different perspective. This phenomenon has been shown to be problematic for (at least certain versions of) relativism. My main aim is to further the discussion by showing that the phenomenon extends to other perspectival expressions than predicates (...)
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  • Biscuit Conditionals and Prohibited ‘Then’.Julia Zakkou - 2017 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 6 (2):84-92.
    It is generally agreed that there are two kinds of indicative conditionals that do not contain conditional 'then.' There are hypothetical conditionals such as 'If Mary has done the groceries, there is beer in the fridge' and there are biscuit conditionals such as 'If you are thirsty, there is beer in the fridge.' There is also broad consensus that we cannot find an analogous distinction between hypothetical and biscuit conditionals within indicative conditionals that do feature 'then.' Conditionals containing 'then,' it (...)
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  • (1 other version)A Compositional Semantics for 'If Then' Conditionals.Mathieu Vidal - 2016 - In Maxime Amblard, Philippe de Groote, Sylvain Pogodalla & Christian Rétoré (eds.), Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics. Celebrating 20 Years of LACL (1996–2016). Berlin, Germany: Springer. pp. 291-307.
    This paper presents the first compositional semantics for if then conditionals. The semantics of each element are first examined separately. The meaning of if is modeled according to a possible worlds semantics. The particle then is analyzed as an anaphoric word that places its focused element inside the context settled by a previous element. Their meanings are subsequently combined in order to provide a formal semantics of if A then C conditionals, which differs from the simple if A, C form. (...)
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  • A plea for monsters.Philippe Schlenker - 2002 - Linguistics and Philosophy 26 (1):29-120.
    Kaplan claims in Demonstratives that no operator may manipulate the context of evaluation of natural language indexicals. We show that this is not so. In fact, attitude reports always manipulate a context parameter (or, rather, a context variable). This is shown by (i) the existence of De Se readings of attitude reports in English (which Kaplan has no account for), and (ii) the existence of a variety of indexicals across languages whose point of evaluation can be shifted, but only in (...)
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  • Decomposing relevance in conditionals.Daniel Lassiter - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (3):644-668.
    Conditionals frequently convey that the antecedent is relevant to the consequent. Recently many authors have argued that this relevance is part of the conventional meaning of conditionals, but this approach fails to account for many examples where a conditional is used to conveyirrelevance of antecedent to consequent. Both types of conditionals are best explained by a conventional meaning with no relevance requirement, and a separate process of coherence establishment among successive clauses in discourse. This account is supported by the distribution (...)
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  • Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21.Rob Truswell, Chris Cummins, Caroline Heycock, Brian Rabern & Hannah Rohde (eds.) - 2018 - Semantics Archives.
    The present volume contains a collection of papers presented at the 21st annual meeting “Sinn und Bedeutung” of the Gesellschaft fur Semantik, which was held at the University of Edinburgh on September 4th–6th, 2016. The Sinn und Bedeutung conferences are one of the leading international venues for research in formal semantics.
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  • A unified analysis of conditionals as topics.Christian Ebert, Cornelia Ebert & Stefan Hinterwimmer - 2014 - Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (5):353-408.
    We bring out syntactic and semantic similarities of two types of conditionals with fronted antecedents [normal indicative conditionals and biscuit conditionals ] and two types of left dislocation constructions in German, which mark two types of topicality. On the basis of these similarities we argue that NCs and BCs are aboutness topics and relevance topics, respectively. Our analysis extends the approach to aboutness topicality of Endriss to relevance topics to derive the semantic and pragmatic contribution of left-dislocated DPs and applies (...)
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  • Conditionals.Kyle Rawlins - 2013 - Natural Language Semantics 21 (2):111-178.
    I give an account of the compositional semantics of unconditionals that explains their relationship to if -conditionals in the Lewis/Kratzer/Heim tradition. Unconditionals involve an alternative-denoting adjunct that supplies domain restrictions pointwise to a main-clause operator such as a modal. The differences from if -clauses follow from the structure of the adjuncts; both are conditionals in the Lewisian sense. In the course of treating unconditionals, I provide a concrete implementation of conditionals where conditional adjuncts in general are a species of correlative, (...)
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  • Subjunctive biscuit and stand-off conditionals.Eric Swanson - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 163 (3):637-648.
    Conventional wisdom has it that many intriguing features of indicative conditionals aren’t shared by subjunctive conditionals. Subjunctive morphology is common in discussions of wishes and wants, however, and conditionals are commonly used in such discussions as well. As a result such discussions are a good place to look for subjunctive conditionals that exhibit features usually associated with indicatives alone. Here I offer subjunctive versions of J. L. Austin’s ‘biscuit’ conditionals—e.g., “There are biscuits on the sideboard if you want them”—and subjunctive (...)
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  • Counterfactuals, correlatives, and disjunction.Luis Alonso-Ovalle - 2009 - Linguistics and Philosophy 32 (2):207-244.
    The natural interpretation of counterfactuals with disjunctive antecedents involves selecting from each of the disjuncts the worlds that come closest to the world of evaluation. It has been long noticed that capturing this interpretation poses a problem for a minimal change semantics for counterfactuals, because selecting the closest worlds from each disjunct requires accessing the denotation of the disjuncts from the denotation of the disjunctive antecedent, which the standard boolean analysis of or does not allow (Creary and Hill, Philosophy of (...)
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  • Ontological Symmetry in Language: A Brief Manifesto.Philippe Schlenker - 2006 - Mind and Language 21 (4):504-539.
    In the tradition of quantified modal logic, it was assumed that significantly different linguistic systems underlie reference to individuals, to times and to ‘possible worlds’. Various results from recent research in formal semantics suggest that this is not so, and that there is in fact apervasive symmetrybetween the linguistic means with which we refer to these three domains. Reference to individuals, times and worlds is uniformly effected through generalized quantifiers, definite descriptions, and pronouns, and in each domain grammatical features situate (...)
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  • Necessary versus probable cause.Lisa A. Reed - 1999 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 28 (3):289-326.
    One finds in the systems of natural languages some explicit means of elaborating not only upon the directness of the causal relationship believed to exist between two events X and Y (i.e. some means of specifying just how inevitably event X gives or gave rise to event Y), but also some manner of indicating just who or what is understood to be the primary instigator of the caused event. The goal of the present paper is to explore these notions in (...)
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  • The role of categorization in the contribution of conditional then: Comments on Iatridou.Michael Hegarty - 1996 - Natural Language Semantics 4 (1):111-119.
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  • Locutions en SI et marqueurs dans la protase : Compositionnalité et indices co-textuels.Jeanne Aptekman - 2008 - Corela. Cognition, Représentation, Langage 6 (1).
    Nous nous intéresserons ici à des cas dans lesquels SI est associé à un autre marqueur, pour essayer de déterminer les différents types d’usages qui s’en dégagent. En nous appuyant sur notre classification des valeurs de SI, nous distinguerons deux cas. Dans le premier cas, il semble qu’un sens nouveau émerge, qui ne pourrait être construit uniquement avec SI, et qui semble même pouvoir aller à l’encontre des usages traditionnels de SI. Dans le deuxième cas au contraire, la présence du (...)
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