Comments on: Conditionals in Undergraduate Semantics

By: M@

M@ — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 19:11:55 +0000

There is certainly something to be said for a technical book which organises material around a cohering central concern. I was in Graham's class of 1999 - we worked on draft material - and I still have a soft spot for the book. It would be my first choice of text for the kind of course Greg is teaching this semester.

There is a wealth of material in the semantics and pragmatics of conditionals and it would be great to see it similarly well organised. Further, the idea of finding an appropriate semantics for a construction we use so frequently in natural language proves rather engaging for undergraduates in my experience.

I look forward to seeing the book!

By: Antonio Marmo

Antonio Marmo — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 07:39:10 +0000

We also need to see some material from the 80’s and
the 70’s online. I see people quoting them all the
time, but we cannot find them in websites.
Kai von Fintel’s notes and papers help a lot because they are available at the click of a mouse.

But I suggest that, before passing any of the non-classic notions, one interesting exercise would consist of showing students judgements of sentences according to
classic logic and asking them whether they agreed or not, following their intuition.
This sort of activity always reveals non-expected results. And also it would help
the teacher to convince students that they do not need to accept classic logic
as the absolute and eternal unchangeable truth among all that is true.

By: Greg Restall

Greg Restall — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 06:51:40 +0000

Kai, please do write this book! I think it would be wonderful for me to have something relatively self-contained to point to when I teach this material. I didn’t want to give the impression that I thought that structuring a course on the semantics of conditionals was a bad idea — I think it’s neat. I just don’t think that it’s the way that I would attempt to give a rounded survey of non-classical logic. Still, Priest’s is a very neat book nonetheless, and a book centred on semantics on this topic would be super.

By: Kai von Fintel

Kai von Fintel — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 23:08:09 +0000

Cool, Jason.

OK, so prior art invalidates my patent claim. I am late to the show. All the more reason to think that it is a worthwhile idea.

By: Jason Stanley

Jason Stanley — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 21:44:03 +0000

I centered my undergraduate philosophy of language course this semester around the topic of conditionals. It has proven to be a pretty good way of introducing lots of foundational material, from the Gricean apparatus (when one tries to defend the view that indicatives are just material conditionals), to modal semantics, to the distinction between expressive meaning and truth-conditional meaning (when one gets up to the Lewis triviality results and NTV views).

By: Antonio Marmo

Antonio Marmo — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 19:22:16 +0000

I think that is an excellent idea and I envy your students for having this opportunity.

I think Graham Priest will also be very happy with the news.