The appropriateness, or acceptability, of a conditional does not just ‘go with’ the corresponding conditional probability. A condition of dependence is required as well. In this paper a particular notion of dependence is proposed. It is shown that under both a forward causal and a backward evidential reading of the conditional, this appropriateness condition reduces to conditional probability under some natural circumstances. Because this is in particular the case for the so-called diagnostic reading of the conditional, this analysis might help (...) to explain some of Douven and Verbrugge’s empirical observations. (shrink)

In terms of Groenendijk and Stokhofs (1984) formalization of exhaustive interpretation, many conversational implicatures can be accounted for. In this paper we justify and generalize this approach. Our justification proceeds by relating their account via Halpern and Moses (1984) non-monotonic theory of only knowing to the Gricean maxims of Quality and the first sub-maxim of Quantity. The approach of Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984) is generalized such that it can also account for implicatures that are triggered in subclauses not entailed by (...) the whole complex sentence. (shrink)

In this paper an approach to the exhaustive interpretation of answers is developed. It builds on a proposal brought forward by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984). We will use the close connection between their approach and McCarthy's (1980, 1986) predicate circumscription and describe exhaustive interpretation as an instance of interpretation in minimal models, well-known from work on counterfactuals (see for instance Lewis (1973)). It is shown that by combining this approach with independent developments in semantics/pragmatics one can overcome certain limitations of (...) Groenenedijk and Stokhof's (1984) proposal. In the last part of the paper we will provide a Gricean motivation for exhaustive interpretation building on work of Schulz (to appear) and van Rooij and Schulz (2004). (shrink)

Cimpian et al. observed that we accept generic statements of the form ‘Gs are f’ on relatively weak evidence, but that if we are unfamiliar with group G and we learn a generic statement about it, we still treat it inferentially in a much stronger way: all Gs are f. This paper makes use of notions like ‘representativeness’, ‘contingency’ and ‘relative difference’ from psychology to provide a uniform semantics of generics that explains why people accept generics based on weak evidence. (...) The spirit of the approach has much in common with Leslie’s cognition-based ideas about generics, but the semantics will be grounded on a strengthening of Cohen’s relative readings of generic sentences. In contrast to Leslie and Cohen, we propose a uniform semantic analysis of generics. The basic intuition is that a generic of the form ‘Gs are f’ is true because f is typical for G, which means that f is valuably associated with G. We will make use of Kahneman and Tversky’s Heuristics and Biases approach, according to which people tend to confuse questions about probability with questions about representativeness, to explain pragmatically why people treat many generic statements inferentially in a much stronger way. (shrink)

In terms of Groenendijk and Stokhof’s (1984) formalization of exhaustive interpretation, many conversational implicatures can be accounted for. In this paper we justify and generalize this approach. Our justification proceeds by relating their account via Halpern and Moses’ (1984) non-monotonic theory of ‘only knowing’ to the Gricean maxims of Quality and the first sub-maxim of Quantity. The approach of Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984) is generalized such that it can also account for implicatures that are triggered in subclauses not entailed by (...) the whole complex sentence. (shrink)

This paper deals with the truth conditions of conditional sentences. It focuses on a particular class of problematic examples for semantic theories for these sentences. I will argue that the examples show the need to refer to dynamic, in particular causal laws in an approach to their truth conditions. More particularly, I will claim that we need a causal notion of consequence. The proposal subsequently made uses a representation of causal dependencies as proposed in Pearl (2000) to formalize a causal (...) notion of consequence. This notion inserted in premise semantics for counterfactuals in the style of Veltman (1976) and Kratzer (1979) will provide a new interpretation rule for conditionals. I will illustrate how this approach overcomes problems of previous proposals and end with some remarks on remaining questions. (shrink)

In this paper an approach to the exhaustive interpretation of answers is developed. It builds on a proposal brought forward by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984). We will use the close connection between their approach and McCarthy’s (1980, 1986) predicate circumscription and describe exhaustive interpretation as an instance of interpretation in minimal models, well-known from work on counterfactuals (see for instance Lewis (1973)). It is shown that by combining this approach with independent developments in semantics/pragmatics one can overcome certain limitations of (...) Groenenedijk and Stokhof’s (1984) proposal. In the last part of the paper we will provide a Gricean motivation for exhaustive interpretation building on work of Schulz (to appear) and van Rooij and Schulz (2004). (shrink)

Kein Geringerer als Arthur Schopenhauer beurteilte Kants Prolegomena als die "schönste und faßlichste aller Kantischen Hauptschriften, welche viel zu wenig gelesen wird, da sie doch das Studium seiner Philosophie außerordentlich erleichtert". Die Prolegomena von 1783 sind eine Kurzfassung der "Kritik der reinen Vernunft", deren Plan und Ergebnisse sie übersichtlich darstellen sollen. In Umkehrung der Methode der Kritik - statt der synthetischen Lehrart wird nun die analytische befolgt - nimmt Kant unter der Leitfrage "Wie sind synthetische Urteile a priori möglich?" eine (...) Inhalts-, Umfangs- und Grenzbestimmung reiner Erkenntnis vor. Orientiert am Ideal der Mathematik und der Naturwissenschaft soll der Metaphysik hinsichtlich der Gewißheit ihrer Prinzipien die Nobilitierung einer Wissenschaft zuteil werden, die ihr vor der Kritik versagt war. Damit sind die Prolegomena nicht nur eine Einführung in den Transzendentalen Idealismus Kants, sondern dokumentieren bereits die Weiterführung dieser Kritischen Philosophie, welche sich über die "Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten" (1785) sowie die "Metaphysischen Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft" (1786) bis zur zweiten Auflage der Kritik (1787) und über diese hinaus fortsetzt. (shrink)

Many languages allow for “fake” uses of their past tense marker: the marker: can occur in certain contexts without conveying temporal pastness. Instead it appears to bear a modal meaning. Iatridou :231–270, 2000) has dubbed this phenomenon Fake Tense. Fake Tense is particularly common to conditional constructions. This paper analyzes Fake Tense in English conditional sentences as a certain kind of ambiguity: the past tense morphology can mark the presence of a temporal operator, but it can also signal a specific (...) modal operator. The ambiguity is proposed to be the result of recategorization: the Simple Past develops a second, modal meaning because of structural similarities between the temporal and the modal/epistemic domain. The proposal is spelled out in the generative semantics framework, using the restrictor approach to conditionals Semantics from different points of view, 1979; in: A. von Stechow and D. Wunderlich Semantics: an international handbook of contemporary research, 1991), and building on von Stechows et al.’s recent work on the English tense system The expression of time in language, 2010; Romero and von Stechow, Tense: introduction, 2008). (shrink)

This paper deals with the truth conditions of conditional sentences. It focuses on a particular class of problematic examples for semantic theories for these sentences. I will argue that the examples show the need to refer to dynamic, in particular causal laws in an approach to their truth conditions. More particularly, I will claim that we need a causal notion of consequence. The proposal subsequently made uses a representation of causal dependencies as proposed in Pearl to formalize a causal notion (...) of consequence. This notion inserted in premise semantics for counterfactuals in the style of Veltman and Kratzer will provide a new interpretation rule for conditionals. I will illustrate how this approach overcomes problems of previous proposals and end with some remarks on remaining questions. (shrink)

In this paper, a pragmatic approach to the phenomenon of free choice permission is proposed. Free choice permission is explained as due to taking the speaker (i) to obey certain Gricean maxims of conversation and (ii) to be competent on the deontic options, i.e. to know the valid obligations and permissions. The approach differs from other pragmatic approaches to free choice permission in giving a formally precise description of the class of inferences that can be derived based on these two (...) assumptions. This formalization builds on work of Halpern and Moses (1984) on the concept of ‘only knowing’, generalized by Hoek et al., (1999, 2000), and Zimmermann’s (2000) approach to competence. (shrink)

Objects have dispositions. Dispositions are normally analyzed by providing a meaning to disposition ascriptions like ‘This piece of salt is soluble’. Philosophers like Carnap, Goodman, Quine, Lewis and many others have proposed analyses of such disposition ascriptions. In this paper we will argue with Quine that the proper analysis of ascriptions of the form ‘x is disposed to m ’, where ‘x’ denotes an object, ‘m’ a manifestation, and ‘C’ a condition, goes like this: ‘x is of natural kind k’, (...) and the generic ‘ks are m ’ is true. For the analysis of the generic, we propose an analysis in terms of causal powers: ‘ks have the causal power to m’. The latter, in turn, is analyzed in a very precise way, making use of Pearl’s probabilistic graphical causal models. We will show how this natural kind-analysis improves on standard conditional analyses of dispositions by avoiding the standard counterexamples, and that it gives rise to precise observable criteria under which the disposition ascription is true. (shrink)

In this paper, we explain why the antecedent of a biscuit conditional is relevant to its consequent by extending Douvenʼs evidential support theory of conditionals making use of utilities. By this extension, we can also explain why a biscuit conditional gives rise to the inference that the consequence is (most likely) true. Finally, we account for the intuition that (indicative) biscuit sentences are false when the antecedent is false and allow for counterfactual biscuits.

In this paper, we explain why the antecedent of a biscuit conditional is relevant to its consequent by extending Douvenʼs evidential support theory of conditionals making use of utilities. By this extension, we can also explain why a biscuit conditional gives rise to the inference that the consequence is (most likely) true. Finally, we account for the intuition that (indicative) biscuit sentences are false when the antecedent is false and allow for counterfactual biscuits.

This article aims to propagate Logic Programming as a formal tool to deal with non-monotonic reasoning. In philosophy and linguistics non-monotonic reasoning is modelled using Minimal Models as standard, i.e., by imposing an order (or selection function) on the class of all models and then by defining entailment as only caring about the minimal models of the premises with respect to the order. In this article we investigate the question whether instead of minimal models we should use logic programming to (...) model non-monotonic reasoning. Logic programming is an attractive alternative to a minimal models approach in that it makes concrete predictions in an efficient and transparent way. We study this question by focusing on one particular phenomenon that gives rise to non-monotonic inferences: conditional sentences. (shrink)

Many generic sentences express stable inductive generalizations. Stable inductive generalizations are typically true for a causal reason. In this paper we investigate to what extent this is also the case for the generalizations expressed by generic sentences. More in particular, we discuss the possibility that many generic sentences of the form ‘ks have feature e’ are true because kind k have the causal power to ‘produce’ feature e. We will argue that such an analysis is quite close to a probabilistic (...) based analysis of generic sentences according to which ‘relatively many’ ks have feature e, and that, in fact, this latter type of analysis can be ‘grounded’ in terms of causal powers. We will argue, moreover, that the causal power analysis is sometimes preferred to a correlation-based analysis, because it takes the causal structure that gives rise to the probabilistic data into account. (shrink)

IntroductionThe meaning of conditional sentences bears an intrinsic relation to a number of central philosophical problems, like the nature of reasoning, the possibility of knowledge, and the status of laws of nature. This has incited philosophers to spend a lot of time working on conditionals and to fill countless bookshelves with inspiring and sophisticated theories on their meaning. However, the overall question of how to approach the meaning of conditionals is still open. There are many different theories on the market, (...) many central issues still need to be solved.But as a topic philosophers are interested in conditionals are special in that they are real; they can be the subject of empirical investigations. And they are actually investigated – in linguistic, in psychology, in the cognitive sciences. The goal of this paper is to illustrate how this ‘external’ information can be used to answer questions on the semantics of conditional sentences that philosophers and logicians are int .. (shrink)

The paper focuses on a recent challenge brought forward against the interventionist approach to the meaning of counterfactual conditionals. According to this objection, interventionism cannot account for the interpretation of right-nested counterfactuals, the problem being its strict interventionism. We will report on the results of an empirical study supporting the objection. Furthermore, we will extend the well-known logic of intervention with a new operator expressing an alternative notion of intervention that does away with strict interventionism. This new notion of intervention (...) operates on the valuation of the variables in a causal model, and not on their functional dependencies. (shrink)

L’heure est à la commémoration du mouvement de 1968, en Allemagne comme ailleurs. On considère que 1968 est à l’origine des nouveaux mouvements sociaux des années 1970 et 1980, dont le mouvement des femmes. Premier d’une série de mouvements sociaux, le « nouveau mouvement des femmes » émerge en Allemagne en 1971 au cours du processus de mobilisation contre la loi sur l’avortement (article 218 du code pénal). L’engagement des femmes est moins visible dans les mouvements protestataires de la f...

L’heure est à la commémoration du mouvement de 1968, en Allemagne comme ailleurs. On considère que 1968 est à l’origine des nouveaux mouvements sociaux des années 1970 et 1980, dont le mouvement des femmes. Premier d’une série de mouvements sociaux, le « nouveau mouvement des femmes » émerge en Allemagne en 1971 au cours du processus de mobilisation contre la loi sur l’avortement (article 218 du code pénal). L’engagement des femmes est moins visible dans les mouvements protestataires de la f...

According to Adams, the acceptability of an indicative conditional goes with the conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent. However, some conditionals seem to be inappropriate, although their corresponding conditional probability is high. These are cases with a missing link between antecedent and consequent. Other conditionals are appropriate even though the conditional probability is low. Finally, we have the so-called biscuit conditionals. In this paper we will generalize analyses of Douven and others to account for the appropriateness of conditionals (...) in terms of evidential support. Our generalization involves making use of Value, or intensity. We will show how this generalization helps to account for biscuit conditionals and conditional threats and promises. Finally, a link is established between this analysis of conditionals and an analysis of generic sentences. (shrink)