Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 2, Page 276-277, April 2022.

Jean Buridan developed his theory of consequence within a semantical framework compatible with what we now call token-based semantics. In his Treatise on Consequences and Sophismata, Buridan showed...

The view that actually has a reading on which it is a two-dimensional indexical modal operator has some problems.

ABSTRACT Natural language semantics is heir to two formalisms. There is the extensional machinery of explicit variables traditionally used to model reference to individuals, and the intensional machinery of implicit index parameters traditionally used to model reference to worlds and times. I propose instead a simple and unified extensional formalism – explicit semantics – on which all sentences include explicit individual, world and time variables. No implicit index parameters are needed.

It has long been known that the popular account of egocentric thoughts developed by David Lewis is in conflict with a natural account of communication, according to which successful communication requires the transmission of a thought content from speaker to hearer. In this paper, I discuss a number of proposed attempts to reconcile these two accounts of egocentric thought and communication. Each of them postulates two kinds of mental content, where one is egocentric, and the other is transmitted from speaker (...) to hearer in communication. I argue that Ninan’s account, which involves multi-centered contents, and Kölbel’s and Moss’s accounts, which postulate centered and uncentered proxy contents, respectively, are unsatisfactory. Therefore, I propose a two-dimensionalist account, according to which egocentric thoughts are represented by primary intensions, while the thoughts shared by speaker and hearer in cases of successful communication are represented by secondary intensions. Finally, I argue that aside from being able to reconcile Lewis’s account of egocentric thoughts with the natural account of communication, two-dimensionalism also provides the means for modeling agreement and disagreement. (shrink)

Natural language provides motivation for studying modal backwards-looking operators such as “now”, “then” and “actually” that evaluate their argument formula at some previously considered point instead of the current one. This paper investigates the expressive power over models of both propositional and first-order basic modal language enriched with such operators. Having defined an appropriate notion of bisimulation for first-order modal logic, I show that backwards-looking operators increase its expressive power quite mildly, contrary to beliefs widespread among philosophers of language and (...) formal semanticists. That in turn presents a strong argument for the use of operator-based systems in the semantics of natural language, instead of systems with explicit quantification over worlds and times that have become a de-facto standard for such applications. The popularity of such explicit-quantification systems is shown to be based on the misinterpretation of a claim by Cresswell, which led many philosophers and linguists to assume that introducing “now” and “then” is expressively equivalent to explicitly quantifying over worlds and times. (shrink)

One of the most gripping intuitions that people have about time is that it, in some sense “flows.” This sense of flow has been articulated in a number of ways, ranging from us moving into the future or the future rushing towards us, and there has been no shortage of metaphors and descriptions to characterize this sense of passage. Despite the many forms of the metaphor and its widespread occurrence, it has been argued that there is a deep conceptual problem (...) in any assumption that time “passes” or “flows.” The idea expressed by the metaphor is supposed to be incoherent. But is the idea expressed by this metaphor really incoherent? In this essay I will argue that, on one understanding of the metaphor, it is not. I’ll argue that the metaphor can be unpacked as representing three features of temporal experience, and while these features together appear to lead to paradox, I will argue that correctly handled they do not. (shrink)

This paper explains how to obtain quantification over times in a tense logic in which all temporal distinctions are ultimately spelled out in terms of the two simple tense operators “it was the case that” and “it will be the case that.” The account of times defended here is similar to what is known as “linguistic ersatzism” about possible worlds, but there are noteworthy differences between these two cases. For example, while linguistic ersatzism would support actualism, the view of times (...) defended here does not support presentism. (shrink)

Lewis (The Journal of Philosophy, 65(5), 113–126, 1968) attempts to provide an account of modal talk in terms of the resources of counterpart theory, a first-order theory that eschews transworld identity. First, a regimentation of natural language modal claims into sentences of a formal first-order modal language L is assumed. Second, a translation scheme from L-sentences to sentences of the language of the theory is provided. According to Hazen (The Journal of Philosophy, 76(6), 319–338, 1979) and Fara & Williamson (Mind, (...) 114(453), 1–30, 2005), the account cannot handle certain natural language modal claims involving a notion of actuality. The challenge has two parts. First, in order to handle such claims, the initial formal modal language that natural language modal claims are regimented into must extend L with something like an actuality operator. Second, certain ways that Lewis’ translation scheme for L might be extended to accommodate an actuality operator are unacceptable. Meyer (Mind, 122(485), 27–42, 2013) attempts to defend Lewis’ approach. First, Meyer holds that in order to handle such claims, the formal modal language L$$^*$$ ∗ that we initially regiment our natural language claims into need not contain an actuality operator. Instead, we can make do with other resources. Next, Meyer provides an alternative translation scheme from L$$^*$$ ∗ -sentences to sentences of an enriched language of counterpart theory. Unfortunately, Meyer’s approach fails to provide an appropriate counterpart theoretic account of natural language modal claims. In this paper, I demonstrate that failure. (shrink)

This paper presents a short survey of recent developments in stit theories, with an emphasis on combinations of stit and deontic logic, and those of stit and epistemic logic.

This paper discusses the fallacies of combination and division as they are presented by Aristotle in chapter 4 of his Sophistici Elenchi. Aristotle's examples are concise, their discussion is unclear, and it is difficult to distinguish the cases of combination from those of division. I analyse the Aristotelian examples and the interpretations offered so far. I show that these interpretations suffer from a major defect: they fail to identify a common characteristic whereby the Aristotelian examples can be classified as instances (...) of combination or division. In my reconstruction of the examples, I repair this deficiency: I give a single pattern of explanation for the fallacy of combination and another (similar) pattern for the fallacy of division. Thus, it is possible to free Aristotle from the following charges: (i) he did not clearly distinguish between combination and division, and (ii) he reduced combination and division to a single fallacy. My explanation of the fallacies uses the notion of scope of an expression: in modern terminology, the fallacy of combination can be described as ?fallacy of the wide scope?, the fallacy of division as ?fallacy of the narrow scope? (shrink)

Recent theories of agency (sees to it that) of Nuel Belnap and Michael Perloff are examined, particularly in the context of an early proposal of the author.

As interest in the study of natural languages has increased, philosophers of language and logicians have, along with linguists, begun to pay more attention to sentences whose truth value varies from context to context. Alternatively, to sentences which are such that, if different speakers utter them, those speakers may say different things. For example, it is well-known that two different people who utter ‘I am hot’ will be saying different things, that two different people who utter ‘Billy is a lush’ (...) may be saying different things, and that different speakers who utter ‘The book on the table is boring’ may say different things. The same sort of familiar point could be made by examples concerning other pronouns, demonstratives, the utterance of ambiguous sentences, and so on. (shrink)

SummaryThis paper develops a semantical account of sentences containing performative principal verbs in which these verbs are analyzed as indexical expressions: the proposition picked out by a sentence containing a performative verb depends on aspects of the context of use of the sentence; and these same aspects of context of use also determine the truth value of the proposition picked out. A two‐dimensional modal operator is utilized in analyzing non‐ performative sentences that contain principal verb which, in other contexts, have (...) performative uses. Thus, the analysis developed accounts for the performative — non‐performative distinction within a formal semantic‐pragmatic framework; the more common approach of relegating the distinction to the somewhat vague realm of ‘language use’ is avoided.RésuméCet article développe un traitement sémantique des phrases contenant un verbe principal performatif. Ces verbes sont analysés comme des expressions indicées: la proposition sélectionnée par une phrase contenant un verbe performatif dépend du contexte d'usage de cette phrase; et ces mêmes aspects du contexte d'usage déterminent également la valeur de vérité de la proposition sélectionnée. Un opérateur modal à deux dimensions est utilisé pour l'analyse de phrases non‐performatives contenant un verbe principal performatif dans d'autres contextes. L'analyse développée rend ainsi compte de la distinction performatif — non‐performatif dans un cadre sémantico‐pragmatique; on évite ainsi la solution habituelle consistant à reléguer cette distinction dans le domaine plutôt vague de l'usage linguistique.ZusammenfassungEs wird eine semantische Darstellung von Sätzen entwickelt, die performative Hauptverben enthalten, indem diese Verben als indexikale Ausdrücke analysiert werden: die Proposition, die durch einen Satz mit einem performativen Verb bezeichnet wird, hängt von Aspekten des Gebrauchskontextes des Satzes ab; und gerade diese Aspekte bestimmen auch den Wahrheitswert der Proposition. Ein zweidimensionaler Modaloperator wird verwendet, um nicht‐performative Sätze zu analysieren, die Hauptverben enthalten, welche — in andern Kontexten — einen performativen Gebrauch haben. Auf diese Weise gibt die entwickelte Analyse innerhalb eines formalen semantisch‐syntaktischen Rahmenwerkes Rechenschaft über die Unterscheidung performativ — nicht‐performativ; man vermeidet dadurch das übliche Vorgehen, die Unterscheidung in den etwas vagen Bereich des sog. 〈Sprachgebrauchs〉 abzuschieben. (shrink)

The truth conditions of sentences with indexicals like ‘I’ and ‘here’ cannot be given directly, but only relative to a context of utterance. Something similar applies to questions: depending on the semantic framework, they are given truth conditions relative to an actual world, or support conditions instead of truth conditions. Two-dimensional semantics can capture the meaning of indexicals and shed light on notions like apriority, necessity and context-sensitivity. However, its scope is limited to statements, while indexicals also occur in questions. (...) Moreover, notions like apriority, necessity and context-sensitivity can also apply to questions. To capture these facts, the frameworks that have been proposed to account for questions need refinement. Two-dimensionality can be incorporated in question semantics in several ways. This paper argues that the correct way is to introduce support conditions at the level of characters, and develops a two-dimensional variant of both proposition-set approaches and relational approaches to question semantics. (shrink)

The paper deals with the problem of axiomatizing a system T1 of discrete tense logic, where one thinks of time as the set Z of all the integers together with the operations +1 ("immediate successor") and-1 ("immediate predecessor"). T1 is like the Segerberg-Sundholm system WI in working with so-called infinitary inference ruldes; on the other hand, it differs from W I with respect to (i) proof-theoretical setting, (ii) presence of past tense operators and a "now" operator, and, most importantly, with (...) respect to (iii) the presence in T1 of so-called systematic frame constants, which are meant to hold at exactly one point in a temporal structure and to enable us to express the irreflexivity of such structures. Those frame constants will be seen to play a paramount role in our axiomatization of T1. (shrink)

This paper follows Part I of our essay on case-intensional first-order logic ). We introduce a framework of branching histories to take account of indeterminism. Our system BH-CIFOL adds structure to the cases, which in Part I formed just a set: a case in BH-CIFOL is a moment/history pair, specifying both an element of a partial ordering of moments and one of the total courses of events that that moment is part of. This framework allows us to define the familiar (...) Ockhamist temporal/modal connectives, most notably for past, future, and settledness. The novelty of our framework becomes visible in our discussion of substances in branching histories, i.e., in its first-order part. That discussion shows how the basic idea of tracing an individual thing from case to case via an absolute property is applicable in a branching histories framework. We stress the importance of keeping apart extensionality and moment-definiteness, and give a formal account of how the specification of natural sortals and natural qualities turns out to be a coordination task in BH-CIFOL. We also provide a detailed answer to Lewis’s well-known argument against branching histories, exposing the fallacy in that argument. (shrink)