Indeterminate NPIs and Scope

Equatives, Measure Phrases and NPIs

Standard semantic accounts of the equative ascribe it an ‘at least’ meaning, deriving an ‘exactly’ reading when necessary via scalar implicature. I argue for a particular formulation of this scalar implicature account which considers that (i) equatives license NPIs in their internal arguments, and (ii) equatives whose internal arguments are measure phrases (MPs) are, in contrast to clausal equa...

Licensing strong NPIs

This paper investigates the differences in distribution between weak and strong NPIs in English. It is proposed that both weak and strong NPIs are licensed by Downward Entailing (DE) operators; but that weak NPIs only pay attention to the truth-conditional content of their licensers, while strong NPIs must pay attention to nontruthconditional meaning as well in their search for a DE licenser. T...

Rationality and indeterminate probabilities

Introduction What is your degree of belief that the Democrats will win the next presidential election in the USA? If you report a sharp number, we will question you further. For example, if you report a credence of 0.6, we will ask whether you really mean 0.6000..., sharp to infinitely many decimal places. If you are anything like us, your credence is sharp only up to one or two decimal places....

Imprecise and Indeterminate Probabilities

Bayesian advocates of expected utility maximization use sets of probability distributions to represent very different ideas. Strict Bayesians insist that probability judgment is numerically determinate even though the agent can represent such judgments only in imprecise terms. According to Quasi Bayesians rational agents may make indeterminate subjective probability judgments. Both kinds of Bay...

An Argument for Argument Ellipsis from -sika NPIs