The Meaning of Imperatives

Abstract

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.

How to Understand Rule-Constituted Kinds

“…Kaufman (2012) argues that a directive that p is synonymous with an assertion that the addressee should/must make it the case that p. On standard Kratzerian contextualist modal semantics, the obligation is conditional on implicit or explicit features that select accessible worlds and order them. This is implausible (Charlow 2018, 82;Roberts 2018, 331); but I do take directives to entail on illocutionary grounds Kaufman's assertoric counterparts (Charlow 2014), and I'll avail myself of this throughout the paper. There are important distinctions to be made among rules or prescriptions in this wide sense (objective vs subjective, general vs particular, cp.…”

Meaning without Information: Comments on Paul Pietroski'sConjoining Meanings

“…Expressivists about normative language, like Gibbard (1990, 2003) take possibilities to be pairs of a possible world and a normative standard or a plan. Expressivists about modal discourse like Yalcin (2007, 2011) and Charlow (2015) take possibilities to be information states of various sorts, or pairs of a world and an information state. In a different strand of literature, Chalmers (2006) and others endorse a notion of epistemic possibility to model differences in cognitive significance.…”

Neopragmatist semantics

“…Let me start by returning to disjunction. Nate Charlow (2015) has recently suggested that expressivists can understand disjunction by making use of a view on which the acceptance of a disjunction is a matter of keeping two alternatives in mind, to neither of which one need be committed. Charlow models this by representing disjunctive states of mind as sets of non‐disjunctive states of mind.…”