Conditional Assertion and Restricted Quantification: Abstracts of Comments

Noûs ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 13 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Michael Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Restricted Quantification ◽  
Conditional Assertion

Ways of Being

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kris McDaniel
Keyword(s):  
Ontological Pluralism ◽  
Restricted Quantification ◽  
Mode Of Being ◽  
Ways Of Being

This chapter develops a version of ontological pluralism that appeals to semantically primitive restricted quantification and naturalness. It also articulate different ways of formulating versions of ontological pluralism. Although the author defends ontological pluralism from some objections, the main goals of this chapter are to get some versions of ontological pluralism on the table, show that they are intelligible and worthy of consideration, and show how concerns about ontological pluralism connect up with historical and contemporary meta-metaphysical issues. The chapter considers versions of ontological pluralism that say that substances have a different mode of being than attributes, that things in time have a different mode of being than atemporal objects, that stuff has a different mode of being than things, and many others.

scholarly journals Necessitism, Contingentism, and Lewisian Modal Realism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Nencha
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Modal Realism ◽  
Timothy Williamson ◽  
Restricted Quantification

AbstractNecessitism is the controversial thesis that necessarily everything is necessarily something, namely that everything, everywhere, necessarily exists. What is controversial about necessitism is that, at its core, it claims that things could not have failed to exist, while we have a pre-theoretical intuition that not everything necessarily exists. Contingentism, in accordance with common sense, denies necessitism: it claims that some things could have failed to exist. Timothy Williamson is a necessitist and claims that David Lewis is a necessitist too. The paper argues that, granted the assumptions that lead to interpret the Lewisian as a necessitist, she can preserve contingentist intuitions, by genuinely agreeing with the folk that existence is contingent. This is not just the uncontroversial claim that the Lewisian, as a result of the prevalence of restricted quantification in counterpart theoretic regimentations of natural language, can agree with the folk while disagreeing with them in the metaphysical room. Rather, this is the claim that it is in the metaphysical room that the Lewisian can endorse the intuitions lying behind contingentism.

Hypothetical Syllogisms and Infinite Regress

2020 ◽  
pp. 131-153
Author(s):  
Marko Malink
Keyword(s):  
Infinite Regress ◽  
Alexander Of Aphrodisias ◽  
De Interpretatione ◽  
Conditional Assertion

In his commentary on Aristotle’s De interpretatione, Ammonius puts forward an argument for the priority of categorical over hypothetical syllogisms. The argument relies on two of the Five Modes of Agrippa, the modes from infinite regress and from hypothesis. Much of the argument, however, remains unclear and open to doubt. The present chapter sheds new light on the argument by considering it against the backdrop of two related arguments given by Pseudo-Ammonius and Alexander of Aphrodisias in their commentaries on the Prior Analytics. The chapter argues that all three arguments originate in Theophrastus’ discussion of Aristotle’s treatment of syllogisms from a hypothesis. They rely on the view that stating a hypothetical proposition If P, then Q does not amount to the unqualified assertion of a conditional proposition, but rather to a conditional assertion of Q on the supposition that P.

Axiomatizing Belnap's conditional assertion

1975 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 383-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Michael Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Conditional Assertion

A Theory of Conditional Assertion

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (6) ◽  
pp. 293-318
Author(s):  
Simon Goldstein ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Indicative Conditional ◽  
New Family ◽  
Traditional Test ◽  
Formal Framework ◽  
Test Operator ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
Conditional Assertion

According to one tradition, uttering an indicative conditional involves performing a special sort of speech act: a conditional assertion. We introduce a formal framework that models this speech act. Using this framework, we show that any theory of conditional assertion validates several inferences in the logic of conditionals, including the False Antecedent inference (that not A implies if A, then C). Next, we determine the space of truth-conditional semantics for conditionals consistent with conditional assertion. The truth value of any such conditional is settled whenever the antecedent is false, and whenever the antecedent is true and the consequent is false. Then, we consider the space of dynamic meanings consistent with the theory of conditional assertion. We develop a new family of dynamic conditional-assertion operators that combine a traditional test operator with an update operation.

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