[Roughly one half of my UMass colloquium on Friday ("slides":http://web.mit.edu/fintel/www/umass-slides.pdf, "handout":http://web.mit.edu/fintel/www/umass-handout.pdf, "acknowledgments and references":http://web.mit.edu/fintel/www/umass-references.pdf) was spent defending an epistemic conditional analysis of indicative conditionals (the one developed by Angelika Kratzer) -- the other half of the talk explored a speech act modifier analysis of epistemic modals. So, it came as a somewhat unsettling surprise to find Kluwer sending me the Table of Contents for the new issue of Philosophical Studies, which contains a lengthy defense of an epistemic conditional analysis of indicative conditionals. I guess I'll have to work through this paper soon and see what's left to say.]
Daniel Nolan. 2003. Defending a Possible-Worlds Account of Indicative Conditionals. Philosophical Studies 116 (3): 215-269, December 2003. doi:10.1023/B:PHIL.0000007243.60727.d4.
bq. One very popular kind of semantics for subjunctive conditionals is a closest-worlds account along the lines of theories given by David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker. If we could give the same sort of semantics for indicative conditionals, we would have a more unified account of the meaning of “if … then …” statements, one with many advantages for explaining the behaviour of conditional sentences. Such a treatment of indicative conditionals, however, has faced a battery of objections. This paper outlines a closest-worlds account of indicative conditionals that does better than some of its cousins in explaining the behaviour of such conditionals. The paper then discusses objections offered by Dorothy Edgington and Frank Jackson to closest-worlds accounts of indicative conditionals, and shows that these objections can be met by the account outlined.
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This entry was posted by fintel on Sunday, December 14th, 2003, at 8:24 am.
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