Delivered comments on a paper by Jeroen Groenendijk (a hero of mine) and Floris Roelofsen this weekend at the 2009 Michigan Workshop in Philosophy and Linguistics. The topic of this year’s conference was the semantics and pragmatics of questions, and the point of Jeroen and Floris’ paper was to supply a logic for a language with devices for expressing both questions and assertions — a project which I take to be in roughly the same vein as the work I’ve been trying to do on the logic and semantics of the imperative mood.
It was an outstanding weekend, in no small part because both my brother Simon and good friend Anders were in town. If you’re interested, you can find my comments here (under the “Talks” heading).
My roommate reliably informs me that in a certain dialect of British English, “skeletal” receives the standard pronunciation (’ske-lə-təl) when used literally (to mean of the skeleton), but receives an altered pronunciation (ske-’lē-təl, I think) when used metaphorically (to mean emaciated).
More grist for Peter Ludlow’s “thin coin” mill, methinks. Anyone know of similar examples of this sort of phenomenon?
Drafts available on my webpage. Comments would be great.
“Directives” is a (long) draft of a dissertation prospectus on the logic, semantics, and pragmatics of imperatives (and related normative language). I won’t try to summarize it here.
“What We Know and What To Do” attempts to develop a version of ordering semantics for deontic modals on which their ordering sources are sensitive (in a precise way) to available information. This allows us to predict the salient intuition in the famous miners case: if they’re in A, we ought to block A; if they’re in B, we ought to block B; but, nevertheless, it’s permissible (indeed, required) to block neither.
Meinong (Um… Philosophy, Rutgers?) seems to have a Rate My Professor page.
I suppose it is worth noting (since I’m not sure many share my interest in the imperatives literature of the 1950s-60s) that Maria Aloni’s solution to the Ross Paradox (“Free Choice, Modals, and Imperatives,” Natural Language Semantics 15, doi) was formulated (in all of its essentials, anyway) in a Lennart Aqvist Analysis piece from 1965 (JSTOR). Aloni does make use of a special logic of alternatives to derive the solution, but the logic doesn’t appear to be doing any work in this case. (She also does cite Aqvist’s piece in her bibliography, but the fundamental equivalence of their views probably wasn’t obvious.)
Morrissey on the tambourine ftw.
From his demo.
In the spirit of procrastination, I finally got around to putting up an academic homepage. See here.
There’s not very much in the way of content at the moment. The only draft I’ve posted is my behemoth qualifying paper, on the semantics of imperatives. I will be adding some less ridiculous material as I tidy up some drafts this summer.
Basking, for the moment, in the glow of a post-dossier fellowship term. You’ll be on your own for a little while.
I personally don’t care what your religion is and don’t think that it has anything whatever to do with your philosophical competence, and I suspect the same holds true for nearly everyone in our field. So I get a little irritated when I see random conservative know-nothings citing the anonymous Plantinga/Dennett liveblogger’s paranoia about anti-religious antipathy among academic philosophers as evidence for how we actually treat people of faith. Whoever you are: I think you should know better than to allow yourself to be a useful idiot for people like that.
Happy “Spring” break.
Say you’re trying to do some deontic logic in a language capable of talking about actions and their impact on the world — e.g., a propositional dynamic logic, with a language of action-terms built by letting 
Maria Aloni (“Free Choice, Modals and Imperatives,” Natural Language Semantics 15) gives a semantic account of free choice effects when possibility modals scope over disjunctions in terms of salient alternatives. She defines an alternative function 
Following up on the earlier post, I think we can pinpoint the source of the version of Kolodny and MacFarlane’s “paradox” that afflicts state of the art accounts of the conditional a little bit better.
Consider a deontic ordering on worlds ≤. Let w be ideal in a set of worlds I iff for all v in I: if v ≤ w, then w ≤ v.
Let a deontic ordering ≤ be monotonic[*] just in case for any two sets of worlds I and I‘ such that I ⊆ I‘ and any w: if w in I and w is ideal in I’, then w is ideal in I. Monotonicity is a presupposition of traditional definitions of deontic orderings (e.g., Kratzer’s). It is, I think, fairly intuitive: if a world is ideal in a set, then reducing its competition (shrinking the set) should not diminish its rank.
