On May 14th 2006, Kjell Johan Sæbø turned 50. On this occasion, a Festschrift was published to honour him. The book was edited by Torgrim Solstad, Atle Grønn and Dag Haug, all of whom are colleagues of Kjell Johan at the University of Oslo. It contains fifteen articles by younger as well as more established researchers. Most of these are affiliated to the University of Oslo, but the list of contributors also includes research fellows of Kjell Johan’s in Holland and Germany.
Most of the contributions can be downloaded as pdf-files at the festsite:
A Festschrift for Kjell Johan Sæbø —- in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the celebration of his 50th birthday. Edited by Torgrim Solstad, Atle Grønn & Dag Haug.
Let me highlight a few of the papers:
- Blutner on embedded implicatures
- von Stechow, Krasikova, and Penka on anankastic conditionals
- Zimmermann on knowledge and desire
Check the site for the full list.
With regard to von Stechow et ali well written paper, I have more than one point to make:
First, why is example (37) a case of failure of transitivity? It sounds ok for me. I can give another anankastic with perfect transitivity:
It is perfectly sound to me. There is no failure of strengthening the antecedent either, as far as my intuitions tell. Take for instance this inference:
It is another perfect valid argument.
Failure of contraposition in (38) is also something I do not agree. The train A to city X sentences of von Stechow’s previous paper were instances of contraposition working fine.
Finally I should say that I have Philosophical doubts about the proposals that treat counterfactuals as strict implications. What differentiates a counterfactual from a material implication is precisely that though the antecedent of the counterfactual is false, the whole conditional is not true, unlike in the case of material implication. Strict implication is unlike this: the box tells me that the material implication is necessarily true or necessarily false.
June 14th, 2006, at 10:32 pm #Thus, if I used classic connectives to represent what counterfactuals are, I would pick the contradiction connective with the implication one: ⊥⇒, for if you check all truth-values of a counterfactual, you always get false, regardless of the values of the antecedent and/or of the consequent, and that would account for the fact that the aforementioned moods of inferences do not work for counterfactuals.
Correction of the example illustrating the strengthening the antecedent possibility:
It is another perfect valid argument.
June 14th, 2006, at 10:37 pm #