Subjunctive credences and semantic humility
نویسنده
چکیده
In light of the chance that the plate will be saved by a sudden gust of hot air, what should we say about the truth conditions of the ordinary conditional (1b)? Some theories predict that (1b) is true. For instance, Lewis 1973b says that the plate being saved by friendly air currents is a remarkable low-probability event, and that worlds where such events happen are farther away than worlds where I drop the plate and nothing special happens. Hence the plate breaks in all the closest worlds where I drop it, and so (1b) comes out true. Williams 2008 develops and defends a neo-Lewisian account which similarly excludes wacky events from worlds closest to ours. And Bennett 2003 develops a “near-miss” proposal, according to which the plate may be saved by friendly air currents in some of the closest worlds where I drop it, but (1b) nevertheless counts as true because the plate breaks at a very high proportion of the closest plate-dropping worlds. Some theories predict that (1b) is not true. For instance, Hájek 2007 argues that (1a) is true and incompatible with (1b), and so he concludes that (1b) is false. Gillies 2007 argues that conditionals like (1a) expand the domain that subjunctives quantify
منابع مشابه
Forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Penultimate version. Subjunctive credences and semantic humility
In light of the chance that the plate will be saved by a sudden gust of hot air, what should we say about the truth conditions of the ordinary conditional (1b)? Some theories predict that (1b) is true. For instance, Lewis 1973b says that the plate being saved by friendly air currents is a remarkable low-probability event, and that worlds where such events happen are farther away than worlds whe...
متن کاملOn 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 ...
متن کاملThe Semantic Space of Intellectual Humility
Intellectual humility is an interesting but underexplored disposition. The claim “I am (intellectually) humble” seems paradoxical in that someone who has the disposition in question would not typically volunteer it. There is an explanatory gap between the meaning of the sentence and the meaning the speaker expresses by uttering it. We therefore suggest analyzing intellectual humility semantical...
متن کاملThe Subjunctive in That Complements
In this section we consider the distribution of the subjunctive and the indicative moods in English complement clauses and argue that the observed patterns can mostly be explained on semantic grounds. Traditional grammarians have long noticed that the opposition between the indicative and the subjunctive mood is semantic, each grammatical form being suitable in a coherent class of contexts. For...
متن کاملA Study on the Formalization of English Subjunctive Mood
One of the main problems that affects the quality of machine translation is how to express the knowledge of language in precision. Subjunctive mood is a very common language phenomenon in English. From the perspective of E-C machine translation, and based on the theory of Semantic Element (SE) in Unified Linguistics, the paper discusses the specific formalization methods for each type of the En...
متن کامل