On What Actually Is

Abstract

The actually-operator, understood as a rigidifier, has been employed for a range of purposes in natural language semantics. In this article I argue that the properties of the operator do not correspond to any feature of natural language or feature natural language users have access to. Nor is it needed to provide a formal representation of natural language sentences-the examples usually provided to illustrate the indispensability of the operator are much more plausibly interpreted using plural quantifiers. This lack of connection to natural language is a serious worry for accounts that appeal to rigidifying operations to explain natural language phenomena, as well as a challenge to theories that appeal to the operator to capture the difference between different kinds of necessity expressed in natural language.

‘Actually’ again

“…340–342) offers an argument to the effect that such sentences are true. Davis (2015, p. 491), on the other hand, finds an analogous sentence ‘unambiguously false’, and similar intuitions are voiced by Melia (1992, p. 49) and Haraldsen (2015, p. 648); Crossley and Humberstone (1977, p. 17) had anticipated such intuitions. The word ‘necessarily’ here expresses, not a concept of epistemic or deontic necessity, but one that makes ‘necessarily …’ equivalent to ‘however things might have been, it would be the case that …’.…”

“…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.…”