1,721,051 research outputs found
Controfattuali
Full text linkI controfattuali sono un tipo di condizionali il cui antecedente viene solitamente ritenuto falso. L’interpretazione di questi condizionali è caratterizzata da una capacità cognitiva peculiare, ossia quella di immaginare scenari alternativi a quello reale e di trarne delle con- seguenze. In questo lavoro, verranno presentati e confrontati tre approcci ai controfattuali: l’approccio, considerato standard (soprattutto tra i filosofi), sviluppato da R. Stalnaker e D. K. Lewis, basato su relazioni di similarità tra “mondi possibili”, l’approccio sviluppato da A. Kratzer, basata sull’idea che la verità di un controfattuale dipenda dalla specificazione di un insieme di premesse e, infine, l’approccio dinamico, sviluppato, più recentemente, da K. Von Fintel e A. S. Gillies, basato sull’idea che i controfattuali abbiano il ruolo di rendere salienti alcune possibilità nel corso di una conversazione
World stories and maximality
Full text linkAccording to many actualist conceptions of modality, talk about possible worlds should be reduced to talk about world stories. Intuitively, a world story is a com- plete description of how things could be. In this paper, I will claim that the world story approach not only suffers from the well-known, expressive problem of repre- senting the thesis of the possible existence of non-actual objects, but it has troubles in representing, in an actualistically acceptable way, the apparently more tractable thesis of the possible non-existence of actual objects. To solve this problem, I will propose a refinement of the approach by the introduction of a novel notion of max- imality, local maximality
How to reject a counterfactual
Full text linkAaccording to D. K. lewis (1973), would-couterfactuals and might-counterfactuals are duals. from this, it follows that the negation of a would-counterfactual is equiv- alent to the corresponding “might-not”-counterfactual and that the negation of a might-counterfactual is equivalent to the corresponding “would-not”- counterfactual. there are cases, however, where we seem to be entitled to accept the would- counterfactual and we are also equally entitled to accept the corresponding might-not-counterfactual and cases where we seem to be entitled to accept the might-counterfactual without being equally entitled to reject the corresponding would-not-counterfactual. In this paper, I will show that a distinction between two types of rejections for counterfactuals (p-rejection and s-rejection) and the recognition that might-not-counterfactuals may play the role of p-rejections (by an application to counterfactuals of the lewisian approach to conversational scores) could explain why the problematic cases should not be seen as cases where the duality of would- and might-counterfactuals fails
Validity and actuality
Full text linkThe notion of validity for modal languages could be defined in two slightly different ways. The first is the original definition given by S. Kripke, for which a formula φ of a modal language L is valid if and only if it is true in every actual world of every interpretation of L. The second is the definition that has become standard in most textbook presentations of modal logic, for which a formula φ of L is valid if and only if it is true in every world in every interpretation of L. For simple modal languages, “Kripkean validity” and “Textbook validity” are extensionally equivalent. According to E. Zalta, however, Textbook validity is an “incorrect” definition of validity, because: (i) it is not in full compliance with Tarski’s notion of truth; (ii) in expressively richer languages, enriched by the actuality operator, some obviously true formulas count as valid only if the Kripkean notion is used. The purpose of this paper is to show that (i) and (ii) are not good reasons to favor Kripkean valid- ity over Textbook validity. On the one hand, I will claim that the difference between the two should rather be seen as the result of two different conceptions on how a modal logic should be built from a non-modal basis; on the other, I will show the advantages, for the question at issue, of seeing the actuality operator as belonging to the family of two-dimensional operators
Conceivability, counterfactual thinking and philosophical exceptionality of modal knowledge
No full textAccording to Williamson (The philosophy of philosophy, Blackwell, Oxford, 2007), our knowledge of metaphysical necessities and possibilities is just a “special case” of our knowledge of counterfactual conditionals. This subsumption of modal under counterfactual thinking mainly serves a methodological role: to sign the end of “philosophical exceptionalism” in modal epistemology, namely the view that our knowledge of metaphysical modalities is obtained by means of a special, dedicated, possibly a priori, capacity. In this paper, I show that a counterfactual approach to modal epistemology is structurally similar to more traditional “conceivability-based” approaches. On this basis, I then show that the counterfactual approach suffers some of the same problems and I conclude that it is still based on a quite exceptional capacity to determine the truth of modal metaphysical claims. Given that, for Williamson, the epistemology of thought experiments should also be subsumed under the counterfactual approach, the problem I raise in this paper has consequences for his approach to thought experiments
- …
