Contrary to aspiration

Contrary-to-Duty Obligations

We investigate under what conditions contrary-to-duty (CTD) structures lacking temporal and action elements can be given a coherent reading. We argue, contrary to some recent proposals, that CTD is not an instance of defeasible reasoning, and that methods of nonmonotonic logics are inadequate since they are unable to distinguish between defeasibility and violation of primary obligations. We pro...

Contrary-To-Duties in Games

The aim of the paper is to bring to the realm of game theory the well-known deontic notion of contrary-to-duty (CTD) obligation, so far not investigated in relation to optimality of strategic decisions. We maintain that, under a game-theoretical semantics, CTDs are well-suited to treat sub-ideal decisions. We also argue that, in a wide class of interactions, CTDs can used as a compact represent...

Normative Requirements and Contrary-to-Duty Obligations

Detection of contrary chromatic change.

In visual search experiments we examined whether targets that are distinguished from distracting items solely by a contrary change in color can be sought spatially in parallel. Targets under time-varying illumination pop out if they present a contrary luminance signal; targets under space-varying illumination can be detected in parallel when they are isoluminant. The results suggest that neuron...

Expressivism and Contrary-forming Negation

A well known challenge faced by any version of metaethical expressivism is to provide an adequate treatment of the so-called Frege-Geach problem. The task is to make sense of logically complex sentences like 'If I insulted the host then I ought to apologize', to do so by making sense of the states of mind such sentences would be used to express, and to preserve the validity of intuitively valid...