“Greg Restall”:http://consequently.org has a post on his current semester’s “teaching”:http://consequently.org/news/2004/03/11/teachingteachingteaching/. He reports there on an advanced undergraduate logic course he is teaching, where he is using an interesting sounding textbook:
bq. I’ve decided to follow Graham Priest’s book “An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/052179434X/geeknotes-20/102-9642575-6972917 rather closely, which means I don’t need to make too many further decisions. (It’s designed to fit into an Australian academic semester, and to follow an intro logic course just like mine.) The book doesn’t take quite the line I’d follow, but it’s much better than a merely “good enough” book that I’d use through gritted teeth. [...]
Graham structures the course around the search for a good semantics for the conditional of natural language. I think that that question is both easier (for many purposes — think of mathematical reasoning — the “material conditional” is just fine and dandy, thank you very much) and more difficult (there’s all sorts of context sensitivity in conditional constructions which a sensible look at would take you very very far away from a second-level undergraduate course) than Graham concedes, so I don’t get as much out of the central theme as Graham does.
I think the idea of Priest’s book is intriguing. In our regular teaching rotation, I am scheduled to teach our undergraduate introduction to semantics and pragmatics next spring. In previous years, I have tried to use various textbooks on the market (Chierchia & Mc-Connell-Ginet, Heim & Kratzer, de Swart), supplemented with my own notes, but I was never satisfied with the classes.
Since I am supposedly busy writing a monograph on conditionals, maybe it would be an interesting spin-off project to create an introduction to semantics and pragmatics centered around the search for an adequate analysis of the meaning of natural language conditionals. (I’ll have to think about copyright issues, because for anything like a textbook I would want to retain the right to have an annually revised version available online for free, even if the book is also distributed commercially by some publisher or other). I suppose Priest has a moral patent on the idea, but I hereby declare a derivative patent for an undergraduate semantics course centered around conditionals.
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.
March 12th, 2004, at 11:22 am #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).
March 12th, 2004, at 1:44 pm #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.
March 12th, 2004, at 3:08 pm #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.
March 12th, 2004, at 10:51 pm #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
March 12th, 2004, at 11:39 pm #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.
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!
March 19th, 2004, at 11:11 am #