Explaining the Actuality Operator Away

Mackay, J. F. G.

doi:10.1093/pq/pqx006

Cited by 5 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Indeed, by clause (a), (iii) is defined only if the referent of "she" is female in the context of utterance, however the use of the indicative suggests that the gender of the referent is not known. 19 This assumption is disputed by Mackay (2017). Mackay observes that the same contrast between subjunctives and indicatives obtains if we drop "actually" from ( 12) and ( 13), as shown in (i)-(ii): (i) If Oswald had not shot Kennedy, things would be different today from the way they are.…”

Section: A8 Body Of Knowledge As a Contextual Coordinatementioning

confidence: 99%

Gender in conditionals

Prete¹,

Zucchi²

2020

Linguist and Philos

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The 3sg pronouns "he" and "she" impose descriptive gender conditions (being male/female) on their referents. These conditions are standardly analyzed as presuppositions (Cooper 1983, Heim & Kratzer 1998. Cooper argues that, when 3sg pronouns occur free, they have indexical presuppositions: the gender condition must be satisfied by the pronoun's referent in the actual world. In this paper, we consider the behaviour of free 3sg pronouns in conditionals and focus on cases in which the pronouns' gender presuppositions no longer seem to be indexical and project locally instead. We compare these cases to previously reported shifty readings of indexicals in so-called "epistemic conditionals" (Santorio 2012) and propose a unified account of locally projected gender presuppositions and shifty indexicals based on the idea that indicative conditionals are Kaplanian monsters.

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Section: A8 Body Of Knowledge As a Contextual Coordinatementioning

confidence: 99%

Gender in conditionals

Prete¹,

Zucchi²

2020

Linguist and Philos

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“…A similar function can be claimed for the adjective ‘actual’. Some authors, however, have argued that ‘actually’ and its kin cannot play that role and so are semantically quite unlike the actuality operator (Davis, 2015; Haraldsen, 2015; Yalcin, 2015; Mackay, 2017). I will argue that they can.…”

Section: Acknowledgmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Closer inspection shows that if we omit ‘actually’ and the like from such examples, the resulting sentences have just the same meaning (Davis, 2015, pp. 482 and 495; Mackay, 2017, pp. 713–716; Wehmeier, 2004, p. 613; Yalcin, 2015, pp.…”

Section: Acknowledgmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to Davis (2015), ‘actually’ is semantically related to the phrase ‘in the actual world’, and the description ‘the actual world’ means ‘the world w such that everything true in w is true’; the only difference he recognizes between ‘actually’ and ‘in the actual world’ is that the former cannot replace the latter when ‘the actual world’ is given a wider scope than its position in the sentence indicates. According to Mackay (2017), ‘actually’ has no effect on truth‐conditions, but when a speaker says ‘actually S ’, the ‘actually’ signals that there is a salient information state of which the information she presupposes when uttering S is not an extension. Under both accounts, ‘Necessarily, snow is actually white’ is unambiguous (except for any ambiguity in ‘necessarily’) and truth‐conditionally equivalent to ‘Necessarily, snow is white’.…”

Section: Acknowledgmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to Mackay (2017, p. 715), who comments on a similar example, the past tense of ‘met’ in (10′) may be interpreted as a real past tense, referring to a time before the time of the utterance, so that (10′), too, has a reading on which the people who might like Sally are those who in fact met her. This is probably right, but, as Mackay points out, adding ‘actually’ makes that reading more natural.…”

Section: Acknowledgmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘Actually’ again

Stephanou

2022

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Some authors have suggested that, contrary to what is usually thought, 'actually' and similar expressions ('in fact', 'in reality', etc.) cannot effect a return to the actual world when used in a context generated by a different modal operator, and so are quite unlike the actuality operator of modal logic. I argue that they can induce such a return. The argument involves comparing them with other devices that can play a similar role, such as scope and mood, and examining the effect of 'actually' and the like in a range of different sentences.

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Diamonds are Forever

Dorr

Goodman

2019

Nous

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We defend the thesis that every necessarily true proposition is always true. Since not every proposition that is always true is necessarily true, our thesis is at odds with theories of modality and time, such as those of Kit Fine and David Kaplan, which posit a fundamental symmetry between modal and tense operators. According to such theories, just as it is a contingent matter what is true at a given time, it is likewise a temporary matter what is true at a given possible world; so a proposition that is now true at all worlds, and thus necessarily true, may yet at some past or future time be false in the actual world, and thus not always true. We reconstruct and criticize several lines of argument in favor of this picture, and then argue against the picture on the grounds that it is inconsistent with certain sorts of contingency in the structure of time.

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Explaining the Actuality Operator Away

Cited by 5 publications

References 24 publications

Gender in conditionals

Gender in conditionals

‘Actually’ again

Diamonds are Forever

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