Conditional preferences and practical conditionals

Abstract

I argue that taking the Practical Conditionals Thesis (PCT) seriously demands a new understanding of the semantics of such conditionals. Practical Conditionals Thesis: A practical conditional [if A][ought(B)] expresses B's conditional preferability given APaul Weirich has argued that the conditional utility of a state of affairs B on A is to be identified as the degree to which it is desired under indicative supposition that A. Similarly, exploiting the PCT, I will argue that the proper analysis of indicative practical (as well as imperative) conditionals is in terms of what is planned, desired, or preferred, given suppositional changes to an agent's information. Implementing such a conception of conditional preference in a semantic analysis of indicative practical conditionals turns out to be incompatible with any approach which treats the indicative conditional as expressing non-vacuous universal quantification over some domain of relevant antecedent-possibilities. Such analyses, I argue, encode a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is to be best, given some condition. The analysis that does the best vis-à-vis the PCT is, instead, one that blends (i) a Context-Shifty account of indicative antecedents with (ii) an Expressivistic, or non-propositional, treatment of their practical consequents.

Triviality For Restrictor Conditionals

“…Similarly, the fact that the default Kratzer analysis for so‐called “anankastic” conditionals assigns them manifestly incorrect truth conditions is occasionally taken as evidence, not against the Kratzer semantics, rather for logical forms for anankastics in which overt matrix clause deontic modals scope (quite exceptionally) under covert epistemic modals (see the discussion and references in von Fintel and Iatridou, ). For a somewhat different view of these dialectics, see Charlow (, ). (See also Isaacs and Rawlins, ; Charlow, for attempts to make the idea of “domain restriction” do work for operators that do not have quantificational force.…”

Clause-Type, Force, and Normative Judgment in the Semantics of Imperatives

“…25. For my own understanding of information-sensitivity in deontic conditionals, see Charlow (2013a). A hallmark of information-sensitivity, on this sort of view, as noted by Willer (2012) (see also Yalcin 2012b), is the apparent failure of modus tollens for natural language indicatives with information-sensitive consequents: rejection of the consequent of such a conditional does not commit one to rejection of its antecedent (as seems clear from sequence (20)).…”

The Meaning of Imperatives

“…On the MAImp, the LF of a conditional imperative with command interpretation is, let's suppose for concreteness, the same as that of a deontic conditional – an indicative conditional with a deontic necessity modal in its consequent; the ordinary discourse effect of such a conditional imperative is determined by a performative interpretation of the corresponding deontic conditional. It is well‐known that deontic conditionals should not generally be represented with deontic necessity modals scoping over conditionals, and there are a number of well‐understood semantics for deontic conditionals that avoid this (for discussion of this claim, see Kolodny and MacFarlane , Charlow ,). Any semantics for deontic conditionals that correctly handles Contrary‐To‐Duty obligations, so that (20) does not entail (21), can avoid the problem sketched here.…”