Probably you know the situation: you tell some of your students or friends about some of the things philosophers think about. You want to make it vivid and you mention some of the famous counterexamples to famous theories – but all you earn is a frown or laughter. Just because the examples may, admittedly, seem a little, tiny little bit far-fetched.
But there’s a remedy now; just provide the next ignoramus with the following link:
So, who’s got the weird fantasy now?
Epistemic modals give rise to many puzzles. Here is one pointed out by Seth Yalcin in his paper ‘Epistemic Modals’ in Mind:
Sentences of the form “p but perhaps not p” (call them Yalcin-sentences) are generally not assertable (you may substitute ‘perhaps’ with other modal phrases expressing epistemic possibility here.) For instance, any utterance of
(1) It’s raining but perhaps it is not raining.
is rejectable.
This observation may seem reminiscent of Moore-paradoxical sentences such as:
(2) It’s raining but I don’t believe it’s raining.
The problematic character of (2) does not seem to be a semantic phenomenon. After all, the proposition expressed by sentence (2) is not contradictory but can indeed be true. The non-assertability of (2) then clearly seems to be a pragmatic phenomenon. Can the defect of Yalcin-sentences such as (1) be assimilated to that of Moore-paradoxical sentences?
Yalcin argues it cannot. He draws attention to the fact that Moore-paradoxical sentences behave well in suppostional contexts. That is, the embedding of such a sentence in a suppostional phrase it not defective any more. By way of illustration, the following sentences may have a proper use in certain conversations:
(3.1) Suppose it’s raining but I don’t believe it’s raining.
(3.2) If it is raining but I don’t believe it’s raining, then I am wrong.
However, the case is different with Yalcin-sentences. They resist even being embedded in suppositional contexts, as the following examples show:
(4.1) Suppose it’s raining but perhaps it is not raining.
(4.2) If it’s raining but perhaps it is not raining, then …
So, Yalcin develops a logic for epistemic modals on which (1) comes out contradictory.
However, both the motivation for his logic as well as his specific proposal leave us unconvinced. Let us comment on both points.
Phloxshop II is over. But some impressions will remain …
… from a workshop on properties and semantics, in Buenos Aires, on the Picture Page.
We’re very happy to announce that Phloxshop II: Modality is now open for registrations. The workshop will be held from the 9th to the 11th at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Speakers include Dorothy Edgington, Keith Hossack (both BBK), and
We are organizing a conference with the title ‘Truth and Abstract Objects. Issues from Bolzano and Frege.’ The conference will be held from the 5th to the 7th of August at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Speakers include Hanjo Glock, Wolfgang Künne, Kevin Mulligan, Tobias Rosefeldt, Ian Rumfitt, Mark Siebel, Peter Simons, Mark Textor, David Wiggins, and four junior researchers. Please check out the conference website.
We are organizing a conference on modality, to be held from the 9th to the 11th of September at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Check out the conference website, including a call for papers/commentators.
There has been an intensive debate about whether modus ponens fails for indicative conditionals. Less attention has been paid to the question of whether similar examples can be constructed for counterfactuals as well. This is insofar surprising as McGee claimed that the Import/Export principle (which leads to the counterexamples for indicatives) holds also for counterfactuals. So, are there counterexamples to modus ponens for counterfactuals?
Let us recall the setting of McGee’s counterexample. There are three candidates for the 1980 election: the two republicans Reagan and Anderson, and the democrat Carter. The polls see Carter far behind Reagan, with Anderson a distant third. Prima facie, McGee’s counterexample can go counterfactual. Suppose I know about the polls but do not receive any relevant information afterwards, perhaps because I go on a safari trip or because I just don’t care. After the time of the election I consider the following argument:
(1) If a republican had won, then if it had not been Reagan, it would have been Anderson.
(2) A republican won.
(3) Therefore, if Reagan had not won, it would have been Anderson.
Given the polls, I will find the premises highly probable although I will dissent from the conclusion. This comes as a surprise: if an inference is classically valid, the uncertainty of the conclusion cannot exceed the sum of the uncertainties of the premises. This puts pressure on the validity of modus ponens for right-nested counterfactuals.
Posted by Moritz.
Finally, biology proved a philosophical theory: Fictional Realism was right all along (or, at least, nearly right).
To which extent are counterfactuals context-dependent? Lewis suggested that we can do without a systematic dependence on context by combining an invariant similarity relation with a variably strict analysis of counterfactuals. Recently, this approach has been challenged partly by drawing attention to the phenomenon of reversed Sobel sequences: sometimes it seems as if the order in which two counterfactuals are uttered makes for a difference in truth-value. Philosophers who take this phenomenon to be semantic in nature have reacted to it by allowing the similarity relation to vary from context to context (for instance, have a look at von Fintel’s semantics for counterfactuals, which you can find here). In this note, I’d like to challenge the semantic analysis of reversed Sobel sequences by arguing that it does not square well with a plausible link between “would”-counterfactuals and “might”-counterfactuals.
Here is the phenomenon. In an initial context, the counterfactual
(1) If she had been at the concert, she would have seen Mick Jagger
may be truly asserted, or so it is assumed. Subsequently, the counterfactual
(2) If she had been at the concert and got stuck behind a group of tall people, she would not have seen Mick Jagger
may be accepted, too. All this is to be expected on Lewis’s account: strengthening the antecedent is not a valid rule of inference. But now suppose that (1) and (2) are uttered in reversed order: it seems that asserting (1) after (2) is not o.k. There is something odd about saying
(3) If she had been at the concert and got stuck behind a group of tall people, she would not have seen Mick Jagger, but if she had been at the concert, she would have seen Mick Jagger.
So, can the order in which these counterfactuals are uttered affect their truth-values?
Posted by Moritz.
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