Abstract

There has been several proposals to resolve the gentle murder paradox; Forrester claims that the paradox shows that the deontic closure principle should be abandoned, while Sinnott-Armstrong claims that the paradoxical result arises from the scope ambiguity. However, I shall argue, the gentle murder paradox hinges on the logical structure of adverbial expressions. Although Davidson shows an insightful way of understanding logical structure of adverbs, there has been misunderstandings concerning the nature of his account. Especially what is called neo-Davidsonian event semantics is based upon combination of two fundamentally conflicting ideas. I shall propose a new way of understanding Davidson's account, on the basis of which I continue to give a new diagnosis of the gentle murder paradox.