traveling

I won’t be blogging for two weeks or so. Morrissey will keep you company.

entailments of imperatives and modals

I take it almost as a datum that, for each pair of questions below, your intra-pair answers should be the same. (‘!p’ should be read as ‘make it that p’, and ‘must’ is some sort of generic deontic modal, ‘may’ is its dual.)

Pair 1.

Q1. Does !(p and q) entail !p?

Q2. Does must(p and q) entail must(p)?

Pair 2.

Q3. Does !(p or q) entail may(p)?

Q4. Does must(p or q) entail may(p)?

One nice feature of views (like Magdalena Schwager’s) that treat imperatives as a species of necessity modal is that intra-pair consistency is automatic.

Somewhat oddly, however, many other views I’ve looked at require giving different answers for at least one of the pairs. Krister Segerberg’s logic of imperatives, for example, says ‘no’ to Q1 and ‘yes’ to Q2; his ‘no’ to Q1 follows directly from his favored resolution of Ross’s Paradox. Maria Aloni’s solution to the Free Choice Permission problem involves saying ‘yes’ to Q3 and ‘no’ to Q4. (Aloni treats ‘!’ as a modal, but as something much stronger than an ordinary necessity modal — very roughly, ∇.)

This seems to me like a rather large problem for such views. Am I wrong about that?

Addendum: there’s an immediate problem with letting your answers to Q3 and Q4 come apart, if, like Aloni, you go in for a semantic solution to the Free Choice Permission problem, i.e., you hold that may(p or q) entails may(p). Suppose, safely enough, that must(p or q) entails may(p or q) (actually, Aloni can’t allow this, but this seems like a strike against her view). Then must(p or q) will entail may(p). Contradiction.

virtual tour of ILLC

I don’t know why, but this is one of the strangest things I’ve seen on the net.

“I think I’m the only guy around who quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald on the ‘Today’ show.”

Here’s a fascinating, hilarious profile of Chris Matthews from last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.

midweek morrissey

counterintuitive!

William Saletan appears to care about animal welfare, but still thinks that South Korea ought to legalize the slaughter of dogs, writing:

To comply with Western sensibilities, the Koreans officially banned dog meat. But they don’t enforce the ban, presumably because they don’t share the abhorrence. And why should they? Why exactly is it gross to eat dogs but OK to slaughter pigs, which, by most measures, are smarter? So we’ve started with irrationality compounded by hypocrisy.

I know it’s really sweet to be annoying and contrarian, but if you really care about animals, you shouldn’t be making the “moral consistency demands that we allow even more animals to be murdered than we already do” argument. He continues…

And, for the rest of you, I’m sorry to say that your practice—and mine—of slaughtering and eating sentient beings will gradually be recognized, God willing, as barbaric and obsolete.

God willing! It would appear that Saletan has no say over what he puts into his mouth.

i can’t believe it

Squeeze is playing Detroit this August. Squeeze. I feel like it would be ridiculous to pass this up, but also ridiculous to pay to see a band who appear not to have done anything worthwhile since the early eighties. Oh what’s the use being coy? Of course I’m going to go.

I used to knock Ann Arbor music. I’ll keep doing that, of course (although they did somehow trick Morrissey into doing a show here). Detroit, however, seems to be doing ok for itself.

i feel…

…like there’s something very stupid about the post below this one.

modals as generalized quantifiers

The Kratzer story about natural language modals is roughly that they make generalized quantifiers, by taking sets of worlds (which may or may not be made explicit) as arguments. On this story, the logical form of a conditional claim of epistemic necessity if p, must q will be given by must(p)(q). The first argument slot of must is the restrictor, the second the scope. Ok.

It seems pretty clear that epistemic modals are conservative, in the sense that they always satisfy the following schema.

δ(p)(q) iff δ(p)(p∩q)

(If p, must q) iff (if p, must p and q)

(If p, might q) iff (if p, might p and q)

But it seems pretty clear that deontic (or otherwise normative) modals are not. Consider (1). (1) seems like good advice, but (2) seems like terrible advice.

(1) If you play Russian roulette, you ought to win.

(2) If you play Russian roulette, you ought to play Russian roulette and win.

I don’t know why there’s this asymmetry, or how it might be accounted for (though I can’t imagine this hasn’t been addressed a long, long while ago, and I have a hunch that adding nested modals, a la von Fintel, might help alleviate things). On the Kratzer semantics, ought means (modulo some other things that aren’t important) all, and all is conservative. Help!

Addendum: thinking some more about this, I’m not really sure where to locate the worry. The Kratzer truth conditions for (1) do seem to be correct — (1)’s true iff in all the deontically best worlds where you play Russian roulette, you win — and that straightforwardly entails that all the deontically best worlds where you play Russian roulette are worlds where you play Russian roulette and win. So what’s going on with (2)?

groan

Bainbridge waxes ridiculous:

You want to help make society a better place? You want to eliminate poverty? Become a corporate lawyer.

It’s all downhill from there.

not proud of posting this

But I can’t help myself  ^-^

Y-C and I saw them in Chicago a few weeks ago. I’m ambivalent about Stephin Merritt, but the show was a knockout.

graphs

This blog is funny.

take nothing for granted

An entirely new draft of an old paper, here. Comments would be nice. Here’s the introduction:

This paper is a brief plea for the relevance of linguistic phenomena (specifically, the phenomenon of semantic presupposition) to epistemological theorizing about the a priori. In particular, I propose, explain, defend, and apply the following constraint on knowability a priori (with ‘KA’ abbreviating ‘it is knowable a priori that’).

(AK) For all φ, ψ such that φ semantically presupposes that ψ: if KAφ, KAψ.

Roughly, (AK) claims a sentence’s content is knowable a priori only if its semantic presuppositions are too. §2 defines the notion of ‘semantic presupposition’ invoked by (AK). §3 makes use of this definition (and some plausible assumptions about the closure of knowability a priori under a priori knowable entailment) to argue in favor of (AK). The rest of the paper is devoted to exploring the (mostly negative) implications of
(AK) for the a priori. Well-known arguments for the contingent a priori and a priori knowledge of logical truth founder when the semantic presuppositions of the putative items of knowledge are made explicit. Likewise, certain kinds of analytic truth turn out to carry semantic presuppositions that make them ineligible to be items of a priori knowledge. On a happier note, I argue that (AK) offers an appealing, theory-neutral explanation of the a posteriori character of certain necessary identities, as well as an interesting rationalization for a commonplace linguistic maneuver in philosophical work on the a priori.

P.S. This is a very drafty draft. I haven’t put in the acknowledgements yet, but I will when I’ve had a chance to make the paper a bit stronger.

LaTeX

This site’s pretty great.

john stossel?

Is this really the best University of Michigan libertarians could do? Actually, don’t answer that…

baron davis…

…is ridiculous.

iz not charlie buckett

Working on a paper (a succinct rewrite with some new twists of the presuppositions/a priori stuff). I’ll post a draft when I’m done.

I’d be curious to know places where people have pointed to sentences like (1) and (2) as examples of the analytic a posteriori. Thanks in advance.

(1) The queen of England is a queen of England

(2) The queen of England is the queen of England

questions about relativism and contextualism about epistemic modals

All of these are minor questions, probably stemming more from ignorance than any sort of insight. Let me stress I’m not trying to push any sort of objection — my puzzlement here is genuine.

why a priori knowability is closed under semantic presupposition

I encounter all kinds of interesting but, I think, misguided objections to my endorsement of (AK).

(AK) For all Φ, p, q: if Φ expresses p and semantically presupposes q, then p is knowable a priori only if q is too.

In this post, I’ll present my favorite formulation of the argument for (AK). I’ll start by explaining what the notion of semantic presupposition invoked by (AK) amounts to.

congrats to simon

He’s going to be giving a talk entitled “Free and bound pro-verbs: A unified treatment of anaphora” at SALT 18! Here’s the program, and here’s a link to his abstract.

I hear he’s also having some luck with graduate admissions.