Subjunctive Conditionals
Subjunctive Conditionals

Author: Michela Ippolito

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 0262019485

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A proposal for a compositional semantics for subjunctive (or would) conditionals in English. In this book, Michela Ippolito proposes a compositional semantics for subjunctive (or would) conditionals in English that accounts for their felicity conditions and the constraints on the satisfaction of their presuppositions by capitalizing on the occurrence of past tense morphology in both antecedent and consequent clauses. Very little of the extensive literature on subjunctive conditionals tries to account for the meaning of these sentences compositionally or to relate this meaning to their linguistic form; this book fills that gap, connecting the different lines of research on conditionals. Ippolito's proposal will be of interest both to linguists and to philosophers concerned with conditionals and modality more generally. Ippolito reviews previous analyses of counterfactuals and subjunctive conditionals in the work of David Lewis, Robert Stalnaker, Angelika Kratzer, and others; considers the contrast between future simple past subjunctive conditionals and future past perfect subjunctive conditionals; presents a proposal for subjunctive conditionals that addresses puzzles left unsolved by previous proposals; reviews a number of presupposition triggers showing that they fit the pattern predicted by her proposal; and discusses an asymmetry between the past and the future among subjunctive conditionals, arguing that the best account of our linguistic intuitions must include an indeterministic view of the world.

A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals
A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals

Author: Jonathan Bennett

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0199258872

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The author, one of the world's leading authorities on the subject of conditional sentences, distils many years' work and teaching into 'A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals', an authoritative treatment of the subject.

A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals
A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals

Author: Jonathan Bennett

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 2003-04-03

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 019153174X

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Conditional sentences are among the most intriguing and puzzling features of language: analysis of their meaning and function has important implications for, and uses in, many areas of philosophy. Jonathan Bennett, one of the world's leading experts, distils many years' work and teaching into this Philosophical Guide to Conditionals, the fullest and most authoritative treatment of the subject. The literature on conditionals is difficult - needlessly so. Bennett's treatment is meticulously careful and luminously clear. He presents and evaluates in detail various approaches to the understanding of 'indicative' conditionals (like 'If Shakespeare didn't write Hamlet, some aristocrat did') and 'subjunctive' conditionals (like 'If rabbits had not been deliberately introduced into New Zealand, there would be none there today'); and he offers his own view, which will be recognized as a major original contribution to the subject. Journeying through this intellectual territory brings one into contact with the metaphysics of possible worlds, probability and belief-change, probability and logic, the pragmatics of conversation, determinism, ambiguity, vagueness, the law of excluded middle, facts versus events, and more. One might perhaps learn more philosophy from a thorough study of conditionals than from any other kind of work. Bennett's Guide is an ideal introduction for undergraduates with a philosophical grounding, and will also be a rich source of illumination and stimulation for graduate students and professional philosophers.

Subjunctive Reasoning
Subjunctive Reasoning

Author: J.L. Pollock

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9401015007

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I am indebted to many people for the help they gave me in the writing of this book. lowe a large debt to David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker, on both general and specific grounds. As becomes apparent from reading the notes, the book would not have been possible without their pioneering work on subjunctive conditionals. In addition, both were kind enough to provide specific comments on earlier versions of different parts of the book, and Stalnaker read and commented on the entire manuscript. Closer to home, I am indebted to my colleagues Rolf Eberle and Henry Kyburg, Jf. , my erstwhile colleague Keith Lehrer, and numerous graduate students for their helpful comments on various parts of the manuscript. Some of the material contained herein appeared first in the form of journal articles, and I wish to thank the journals in question for allowing the material to be reprinted here. Chapter One contains material taken from 'The "Possible Worlds" Analysis of Counter-factuals', published in Phil. Studies 29 (1976), 469 (Reidel); Chapter Two contains material much revised from 'Four Kinds of Conditionals', Am. Phil. Quarterly 12 (1975), and Chapter Three contains much revised material from 'Subjunctive Generaliza tions', Synthese 28 (1974), 199 (Reidel). CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION 1. SUBJUNCTIVE REASONING There exists quite a variety of statements which are in some sense 'subjunctive'.

Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability
Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability

Author: Lee Walters

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2021-02-04

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 0198712731

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Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability comprises fifteen original essays on themes from the work of Dorothy Edgington, the first woman to hold a chair in philosophy at Oxford. Eminent contributors from philosophy and linguistics discuss a range of topics including conditionals, vagueness, knowledge, reasoning, and probability.

Explaining Imagination
Explaining Imagination

Author: Peter Langland-Hassan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0198815069

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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Imagination will remain a mystery--we will not be able to explain imagination--until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis mental state or process--one with its own inscrutable principles of operation. Explaining Imagination upends that view, showing how, on closer inspection, the imaginings at work in hypothetical reasoning, pretense, the enjoyment of fiction, and creativity are reducible to other familiar mental states--judgments, beliefs, desires, and decisions among them. Crisscrossing contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and aesthetics, Explaining Imagination argues that a clearer understanding of imagination is already well within reach.

Williamson on Modality
Williamson on Modality

Author: Juhani Yli-Vakkuri

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-18

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 1351730053

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Timothy Williamson is one of the most influential living philosophers working in the areas of logic and metaphysics. His work in these areas has been particularly influential in shaping debates about metaphysical modality, which is the topic of his recent provocative and closely-argued book Modal Logic as Metaphysics (2013). This book comprises ten essays by metaphysicians and logicians responding to Williamson’s work on metaphysical modality, as well as replies by Williamson to each essay. In addition, it contains an original essay by Williamson, ‘Modal science,’ concerning the role of modal claims in natural science. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.

Mind, Method and Conditionals
Mind, Method and Conditionals

Author: Frank Jackson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-11-01

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 1134707940

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First Published in 2004. This collection of essays brings together some of Jackson's most influential publications on mind, action, conditionals, method in metaphysics, ethics and induction. The papers have been revised for this volume and the collection also includes additional material by ay of endnotes and corrections. It also includes two new postscripts- one on conditionals and one disavowing the knowledge argument.

Handbook of Philosophical Logic
Handbook of Philosophical Logic

Author: Dov M. Gabbay

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-06-29

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 9401704562

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It is with great pleasure that we are presenting to the community the second edition of this extraordinary handbook. It has been over 15 years since the publication of the first edition and there have been great changes in the landscape of philosophical logic since then. The first edition has proved invaluable to generations of students and researchers in formal philosophy and language, as well as to consumers of logic in many applied areas. The main logic artiele in the Encyelopaedia Britannica 1999 has described the first edition as 'the best starting point for exploring any of the topics in logic'. We are confident that the second edition will prove to be just as good. ! The first edition was the second handbook published for the logic commu nity. It followed the North Holland one volume Handbook 0/ Mathematical Logic, published in 1977, edited by the late Jon Barwise. The four volume Handbook 0/ Philosophical Logic, published 1983-1989 came at a fortunate temporal junction at the evolution of logic. This was the time when logic was gaining ground in computer science and artificial intelligence cireles. These areas were under increasing commercial press ure to provide devices which help andjor replace the human in his daily activity. This pressure required the use of logic in the modelling of human activity and organisa tion on the one hand and to provide the theoretical basis for the computer program constructs on the other.