Making Counterfactual Assumptions

Veltman, F.J.M.M.

doi:10.1093/jos/ffh022

Cited by 76 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…For a recent discussion see Rawlins 2008. 33 The general idea that consequents are evaluated in a subordinate or derived context is standard in dynamic semantics -see, e.g., dynamic treatments of donkey anaphora (Groenendijk & Stokhof 1991) or dynamic treatments of presupposition projection in conditional antecedents and consequents (Heim 1992;Beaver 1999) or dynamic treatments of counterfactuals (Veltman 2005;von Fintel 2001;Gillies 2007). But exploiting a derived context isn't quite a litmus test for dynamics since that is something shared by a lot of Ramsey-inspired accounts, whether or not they count as 'dynamic'.…”

Section: :32mentioning

confidence: 99%

Iffiness

Gillies

2010

S&P

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How do ordinary indicative conditionals manage to convey conditional information, information about what might or must be if such-and-such is or turns out to be the case? An old school thesis is that they do this by expressing something iffy: ordinary indicatives express a two-place conditional operator and that is how they convey conditional information. How indicatives interact with epistemic modals seems to be an argument against iffiness and for the new school thesis that if -clauses are merely devices for restricting the domains of other operators. I will make the trouble both clear and general, and then explore a way out for fans of iffiness. Keywords

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Section: :32mentioning

confidence: 99%

Iffiness

Gillies

2010

S&P

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“…Also, a permission contradicts an instruction if compliance with the latter precludes making use of the former. These are simply the common sense facts about our logical concepts and they imply that ''logic has a wider reach than truth' ' (von Wright 1957' (von Wright , 1996.…”

Section: A Logic Of Imperatives?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Others have preferred nontemporal semantic analyses of counterfactual conditionals (Lewis 1979;Veltman 2005). The semantic analysis presented above does not involve any explicit reference to time.…”

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confidence: 99%

Imperatives as semantic primitives

Mastop

2011

Linguist and Philos

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This paper concerns the formal semantic analysis of imperative sentences. It is argued that such an analysis cannot be deferred to the semantics of propositions, under any of the three commonly adopted strategies: the performative analysis, the sentence radical approach to propositions, and the (nondeclarative) mood-as-operator approach. Whereas the first two are conceptually problematic, the third faces empirical problems: various complex imperatives should be analysed in terms of semantic operators over simple imperatives. One particularly striking case is the Dutch pluperfect imperative. It is argued that this construction should be analysed as a genuine counterfactual imperative. On the constructive side, in the last part of the paper a formal semantic analysis of imperatives is presented, in the framework of Update Semantics. On this analysis, imperatives are sui generis semantic entities, on a par with propositions. The analysis also includes an account of the counterfactual imperatives.

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“…Lewis (1981) showed that technically the two approaches are intertranslateable. More recent work in the premise semantic tradition includes Kratzer (1989), Djordjevic (2005), Veltman (2005), Kanazawa et al (2005), Kratzer (2005).…”

Section: Possible Worlds Semantics For Conditionalsmentioning

confidence: 99%