Conference: The state of the Stalnaker-Lewis semantics for conditionals
Time and place: Sep 25, 2009 10:00 AM - Sep 26, 2009 06:00 PM, "Rådsalen" at the administration building, Oslo
Speakers
- Dorothy Edgington, Birkbeck, London
- David Etlin, Leuven
- Atle Grønn, Oslo
- Lars Bo Gundersen, Aarhus
- Janneke Huitink, Frankfurt
- Michael Morreau, Maryland
- Arnim von Stechow, Tübingen
- Lee Walters, University College, London
- Nicholas Allott, CSMN, Oslo
Programme
(A downloadable pdf version, with
abstracts. )
Friday 25th September, 2009
10:00
Welcome
10:15 - 11:45
Dorothy Edgington: The Difference Between Indicative and
Subjunctive Conditionals
Lunch
(We are having a long lunch to allow those who wish to attend Jerry
Fodor's talk on evolution from 12.15 -
2.00.)
2:30 - 3:30
Lars Bo Gundersen: Bye Bye Modus Ponens
3:45 - 4:45
David Etlin: Conditionals, Modals, and Supposition
5:15 - 6:15
Nicholas Allott: Context and Subjunctive Conditionals
Saturday 26th September, 2009
10:30 - 12:00
Michael Morreau: Absurd Tradeoffs in the Evaluation of
Counterfactuals
12:30 - 1:30
Lee Walters: Prospects for a Possible-World Semantics for
Indicative Conditionals
Lunch
2:45 - 3:45
Janneke Huitink: Domain Restriction by Conditional Connectives
4:15 - 5:45
Arnim von Stechow (with Atle Grønn): Temporal Organization of
Subjunctive Conditionals
Theme of conference
The Stalnaker-Lewis possible worlds semantics for conditionals
(S-L), proposed by Stalnaker (1968, 1975) for ‘indicative’ and
‘subjunctive’ conditionals and, with some modifications, by Lewis
(1973) for subjunctives, has become and remained the standard
account of conditionals in philosophy and linguistics. The truth
conditions (on Lewis’ variant) are roughly: a subjunctive
conditional If A, C is true iff C is true at all closest
A-worlds.
There are a number of open questions about the theory. The standard version of the S-L theory in linguistics is due to Kratzer (1981, 1991) generalising suggestions from Lewis 1975. On this account, motivated by the interpretation of if-clauses under quantifiers, ‘if’ is not a genuine connective: rather, if-clauses restrict the domain of an operator, either covert or overt, and ‘if’ is semantically vacuous. There have been some attempts to rehabilitate a conditional connective account: e.g. Huitink 2008 proposes a truth-value gap semantics which is more straightforwardly compositional than the Lewis-Kratzer semantics.
Recently there has been debate in philosophy over whether the S-L theory can deal adequately with ‘chancy’ worlds (Hawthorne 2005; Williams 2008). In such worlds, which may include our own, If I drop this plate it will fall to the ground is not (strictly) true because (e.g.) there is a small chance that random movements of air molecules will deflect it. The problem, essentially, is that it seems too easy for conditionals to be false on Lewis’ truth conditions (undefined on Stalnaker’s).
One issue that is still very much open (and on which Stalnaker and Lewis differed) is whether a unified account can be given of indicative and subjunctive conditionals. Intuitions pull in two directions: If you had washed the car by noon you would have earned 100 kroner seems to report the same thought after 12 o'clock as the following reported before that time: If you wash the car by noon you earn 100 kroner. On the other hand, similar indicatives and subjunctives can have different truth-values, e.g.:
If Oswald didn’t shoot Kennedy, someone else did.
If Oswald hadn’t shot Kennedy, someone else would have.
Edgington, 2008, proposes extending the influential non-truth-conditional account of indicatives (developed by Adams 1975, Edgington 1995 inter alia) to subjunctives.
References
Adams, E. W. (1975). The Logic of Conditionals: An Application
of Probability to Deductive Logic. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel
Pub. Co.
Edgington, D. (1995). On conditionals. Mind, 104, pp.
235–329.
Edgington, D. (2008). Counterfactuals. Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, 108(1), 1-21.
Hawthorne, J. (2005). Chance and counterfactuals. Philosophical and
Phenomenological Research, pp. 396–405.
Huitink, J. (2008). Modals, Conditionals and Compositionality.
Unpublished PhD dissertation, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen.
Kratzer, A. (1981). The notional category of modality. In H.-J.
Eickmeyer & H. Rieser (Eds.) Words, worlds and contexts: New
approaches in word semantics, 38–74. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter.
Kratzer, A. (1991). Modality/conditionals. In A. von Stechow &
D. Wunderlich (Eds.) Semantics: An international handbook of
contemporary research, 639–656. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Lewis, D. K. (1973). Counterfactuals. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lewis, D. K. (1975). Adverbs of quantification. In E. L. Keenan
(Ed.), Formal semantics of natural language: papers from a
colloquium sponsored by the King's College Research Centre,
Cambridge. (pp. 3–15). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stalnaker, R. (1968). A theory of conditionals. Studies in Logical
Theory: American Philosophical Quarterly Monograph Series, 2,
98–122.
Stalnaker, R. (1975). Indicative conditionals. Philosophia, 5(3),
269–286.
Practicalities
There will be a dinner for the speakers on the 25th. If you are not
speaking and would like to come please contact us. We may be able
to book a few extra places.
Some suggestions about where to eat and where to stay in Oslo.
Organised by
Lars Bo Gundersen, Timothy Chan & Nicholas Allott
