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EXPRESSIBLE SEMANTICS FOR EXPRESSIBLE COUNTERFACTUALS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2010

EMMANUEL CHEMLA
EMMANUEL CHEMLA*
Affiliation:
Institut Jean Nicod & LSCP
*
*LABORATOIRE DE SCIENCES COGNITIVES ET PSYCHOLINGUISTIQUE, ECOLE NORMALE SUPÉRIEURE, 29 RUE D’ULM, 75005 PARIS, FRANCE. E-mail:[email protected]
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Abstract

Lewis (1981) showed the equivalence between two dominant semantic frameworks for counterfactuals: ordering semantics, which relies on orders between possible worlds, and premise semantics, which relies on sets of propositions (so-called ordering sources). I define a natural, restricted version of premise semantics, expressible premise semantics, which is based on ordering sources containing only expressible propositions. First, I extend Lewis’ (1981) equivalence result to expressible premise semantics and some corresponding expressible version of ordering semantics. Second, I show that expressible semantics are strictly less powerful than their nonexpressible counterparts, even when attention is restricted to the truth values of expressible counterfactuals. Assuming that the expressibility constraint is natural for premise semantics, this result breaks the equivalence between ordering semantics and (expressible) premise semantics. Finally, I show that these results cast doubt on various desirable conjectures, and in particular on a particular defense of the so-called limit assumption.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Symbolic Logic , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 63 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 2010

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References

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