Addendum to “Subjunctive conditionals’ local contexts”

Indicative versus subjunctive conditionals, congruential versus non-hyperintensional contexts

I do not know how tall you are; I doubt that you starved as a child. My empirical evidence tells strongly against (1), by indicating that childhood malnutrition tends to reduce adult height. In contrast, (2) is logically trivial. How things actually are includes your actual height, whether or not it also includes your childhood starvation; how things would have been if you had starved as a chil...

On the Semantic Composition of Subjunctive Conditionals

In this paper, I offer a unified semantic analysis of subjunctive conditionals that purports to account for their truth and felicity-conditions. The proposal is centered on the claim that the temporal morphology that occurs in subjunctive conditionals in several genetically unrelated languages plays an essential role in the composition of their meaning. I will argue for a time-dependent notion ...

A Schema-Based Approach to Understanding Subjunctive Conditionals

Comments on Juan Comesana: Knowledge and Subjunctive Conditionals

Juan Comesana considers some recent proposals regarding the relation between knowledge and subjunctive conditionals, including those by Dretske and Nozick recommending a " sensitivity " condition on knowledge, and by Sosa recommending a " safety " condition. Comesana raises problems for each of the positions he considers, and at the end of the paper he expresses pessimism about the prospects fo...

Local Contexts and Local Meanings

Stalnaker (1974, 1979) made two seminal claims about presuppositions. The most influential one was that presupposition projection is computed by a pragmatic mechanism based on a notion of ‘local context’. Due to conceptual and technical difficulties, however, the latter notion was reinterpreted in purely semantic terms within ‘dynamic semantics’ (Heim 1983). The second claim was that some insta...