Some Alleged Differences between Imperatives and Indicatives

Hare, R. M.

doi:10.1007/978-1-349-01209-1_2

Cited by 15 publications

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“…This view is similar to, if linguistically subtler than, a view of imperatives that dominated philosophical discussion in the mid‐1900s, R. M. Hare's (Hare , , ) . Although obviously anachronistic to speak this way, there is a fairly clear sense in which the compositional semantic value of an imperative sentence, for Hare, was exhausted by its prejacent (which he termed its “phrastic”).…”

Section: Alternativesmentioning

confidence: 62%

The Meaning of Imperatives

Charlow

2014

Philosophy Compass

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This article surveys a range of current views on the semantics of imperatives, presenting them as more or less conservative with respect to the Truth-Conditional Paradigm in semantics. It describes and critiques views at either extreme of this spectrum: accounts on which the meaning of an imperative is a modal truth-condition, as well as various accounts that attempt to explain imperative meaning without making use of truth-conditions. It briefly describes and encourages further work on a family of views lying somewhere in the middle. On such views, an imperative will semantically determine, without having as its meaning, a modal truth-condition, which figures centrally in accounting for various aspects of its meaning.(3) General: If the weather is good, attack at dawn! Meteorologist: The weather will be good. General: Ah, then attack at dawn! Conditional imperatives will presumably (given the arguments against wide-scope-ism in Section 3.1) receive conditionalized EPs (if p, I command q) as their LFs. Since conditionalized EPs are just another type of indicative conditional, they will go in for modus ponens.

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Section: Alternativesmentioning

confidence: 62%

The Meaning of Imperatives

Charlow

2014

Philosophy Compass

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“…Ross' puzzle (generalized from a related issue around imperatives, Ross 1944) is precisely that these inferences are intuitively invalid. Now perhaps this intuitive invalidity can be explained away on Gricean lines as due to the presence of disjunction; if so, an upward monotonic semantics for ought remains plausible (Hare 1967;Wedgwood 2006;von Fintel 2012, but see Cariani 2013 for objections). However, Jackson & Pargetter's (1986) Professor Procrastinate scenario provides a structurally identical failure of monotonicity which cannot be explained away by Gricean considerations about disjunction.…”

Section: Empirical and Theoretical Motivation For Bayesian Semanticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic and Philosophical Considerations on Bayesian Semantics

Lassiter¹

2016

Deontic Modality

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Recently many theories of the semantics and pragmatics of deontic modals have relied on analogies with decision theory. One particularly straightforward way to make this connection is to build the semantics around degree scales, where the degrees in question involve expected (moral, personal, etc.) value. This "Bayesian" semantics has a number of attractive features involving information-sensitivity, grammatical gradability, and solutions to logical puzzles which plague standard theories of deontic semantics. However, its viability has been questioned by several authors who argue that it is insufficiently expressive empirically or that it builds philosophically suspect assumptions into the semantic theory. These authors have advocated moving instead to a much weaker semantic theory which can express the predictions of the Bayesian theory among many others. In this paper I survey some of the arguments in favor of the Bayesian semantics and respond to objections, arguing that the empirical problems can be met, that the philosophical objections are unconvincing, and that, absent compelling empirical arguments, empirical data and methodological considerations favor a strongly predictive theory of deontic semantics over one with much greater expressivity.

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“…In fact there are at least two plausible bullet‐biting strategies, involving Gricean considerations (Hare, ; Wedgwood, ) or free choice effects (von Fintel, ). These arguments suggest a way to explain the implausibility of the conclusion in terms of special pragmatic features of disjunction which render (8) infelicitous or unassertable in the scenario under consideration, even though it is necessarily true given premise (1).…”

Section: Modal Scalesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modality, Scale Structure, and Scalar Reasoning

Lassiter

2014

Pacific Philosophical Qtr

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Epistemic and deontic comparatives differ in how they interact with disjunction. I argue that this difference provides a compelling empirical argument against the semantics of Kratzer, which predicts that all modal comparatives should interact with disjunction in the same way. Interestingly, an identical distinction is found in the semantics of non-modal adjectives: additive adjectives like 'heavy' behave logically like epistemic comparatives, and intermediate adjectives like 'hot' behave like deontic comparatives. I characterize this distinction formally and argue that the divergence between epistemic and deontic modals explained if we structure their semantics around scalar concepts: epistemic modals should be analyzed using probability (an additive scale), and deontic modals using expected value (an intermediate scale).A prominent line of research takes it both possible and desirable to provide a unified semantics for deontic, epistemic, and other modal notions (Kratzer, 1977(Kratzer, , 1981(Kratzer, , 1991(Kratzer, , 2012. In the first part of the paper I present a puzzle about variable interaction with disjunction that appears to call the feasibility of this project into question, and then point out a related distinction between two kinds of adjectival scales: additive and intermediate. I'll then suggest a way to maintain an overall unified approach using tools developed for non-modal adjectives: we can adopt recent proposals to treat both kinds of modals as having a semantics build around degree scales rather than (or at least in addition to) quantification over worlds. This discussion has both negative and positive implications. On the negative side, it reveals some empirical problems with received theories of the semantics of modal language. On the positive side, it suggests a way to repair these problems by treating the semantics of scalar Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (2014)

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Some Alleged Differences between Imperatives and Indicatives

Cited by 15 publications

References 0 publications

The Meaning of Imperatives

The Meaning of Imperatives

Linguistic and Philosophical Considerations on Bayesian Semantics

Modality, Scale Structure, and Scalar Reasoning

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