Post-Mock with Richard

Thanks, Richard!!

So, I began by making a strong case for the pragmatic implicature reading. I then felt a little stuck: I had made *such* a good case for the Ross entailment's being pragmatic, that another, semantic version seemed unnecessary. I'll now to try to say (more clearly than I did then) just what needs to be said next.

First, the LF in which disjunction takes narrow scope has independent interest. It seems to be allowed by our syntax, so there is a question of what the semantics is for it.

Secondly, it is hard to claim that all claims with Surface Form MIGHT(A v B) are really wide-scope disjunctions: Zimmermann doesn't even try. (He just claims that it is the syntactic "sine qua non" of his solution. Presumably his evidence for the syntactic claim is only as good as the claim that, the LF must be a wide-scope disjunction in order to validate the free choice inference. But this is exactly what Simons and I dispute; if we CAN give a semantics for the narrow LF on which the entailment still holds, the evidence for taking the surface form to really be a wide-scope disjunction *because the Ross's entailment is felt* evaporates.)

Thirdly, there is a good set-centric generalization of our current semantics for MIGHT and MUST which suggests the interpretation for narrow-scope disjunction I'd like to give....since it is intuitively the function of MIGHT and MUST to characterize SETS, it is prima facie plausible that they could predicate irreducibly setwise properties of these sets. (We lack an argument, at least, that they cannot or shouldn't.)

Fourthly, the generalization I have suggested is supported on independent grounds found at the semantics-pragmatics interface. There is good reason to believe, for example, that what is merely a good inference at the level of unembedded assertion is a semantic entailment at the level of belief ascription. Why is *this*? Well, it relates to the idea that belief contexts are intensional (or even hyperintensional).

Consider, for example, a philosopher who (like nearly everyone) accepts that

"Hesperus is Phosphorus is nec. true" is true iff "Phosphorus is Phosphorus is nec. true" is true.

but nonetheless denies that

"Joe believes Hesperus is Phosphorus is nec. true" is true iff "Joe believes Phosphorus is Phosphorus is nec. true" is true. (Compare: "Joe believes Hesperus might not be Phosphorus" is true iff "Joe believes that Phosphorus might not be Phosphorus" is true.)

As for belief ascription, so for epistemic modal statements (which characterize information).

Compare, also the general maxim that belief ascriptions attribute diagonalized propositions, which comes directly from the maxim, "don't say "Joe believes p" unless Joe would assert "p."" This enables a (hyperintensional) account of belief ascription to piggyback on Stalnaker's diagonalization strategy in "Assertion." [which was originally a theory of communicative content.] If we do this, then we can get an account of why you shouldn't say e.g. "Joe believes that p or q" unless Joe would assert "p or q"--which, for Gricean reasons, he probably wouldn't assert unless both disjuncts were epistemically possible for him. Depending on the semantics we give for belief assertion [and the formalization diagonalization provides], it could be positively FALSE to ascribe to Joe the belief that p or q unless both disjuncts are epistemically possible for him.

Another route to (possibly?) the same point: we can associate with a sentence at a context both (a) a semantic value and (b) the characteristic effect the assertion of the sentence has on the context. When we get into belief contexts, we are characterizing an agent's state of mind; when we say "a believes p," we ascribe to him a state of mind which is the state of the context brought about by a felicitous assertion of p. Thus, we can connect the pragmatic effects of unmodalized disjunction with the semantic effects of modalized disjunction.

Lastly, and relatedly, the "mixed info-state" semantics I suggest for embedded disjunctions can help us account for puzzles like MacFarlane and Kolodny's miners puzzle.

Zimmermann basics

Zimmermann is interested in analyzing (unembedded) disjunctions as "lists of epistemic possibilities." Here, what "list" crucially involves is closure: a list of items is closed when nothing else can be added to the list: (intuitively, the list items union to and *cover* the contextually determined set over which we are quantifying--so nothing can be added to the list except a set which is a union of subsets the sets that are already in it). Various "closure operators" which may be added to "open" lists are discussed (and many of them involve Montague type-lifting the items in the list.)

What this involves for choice sentences, syntactically speaking, is that all choice sentences are analyzed as wide disjunctions (the contrast here with Simons couldn't be greater.) So the following inference does follow for Zimmermann:

Might(A)

Therefore, Might (A v B)

...it's just that the conclusion is not a parse that occurs in natural language. As far as I can tell, this gives [[or]] quite a complicated semantic entry. It is going to be a recursive, raised-type thing, but the basis for the recursion will be:

[[or]] = \lambda p . \lambda q . might p and might q.

In order to figure out how the recursion goes, I'll need to learn more about Montague lifts.

Post-Meeting 2/19/10

--Challenge: Consider two felt entailments:

(1) (Might A) v (Might B) => (Might A) & (Might B)

(2) Might (A v B) => (Might A) & (Might B)

Considering that we will, according to Simons, need recourse to pragmatic mechanisms to explain the first felt entailment, isn't a semantics that gives us a semantic entailment in (2) redundant?

--Answer: I'm not sure. It depends on:

1) whether the first felt entailment is really that strong. I guess I don't think it is--especially not on the assumption that epistemic modal operators work in the same way that deontic and other modals do (but perhaps this is not a good assumption to make...) Even without relying on the analogy with other forms of modality, it seems like the felt entailment is NOT CANCELLED by the rider "but I don't know which", but rather forced to a reading in which the entailment was never felt in the first place!

There is Zimmerman's argument that A v B => Might A & Might B. This is a good one in most circumstances. But this is definitely pragmatic.

2) the status and viability of my/Simons's claim that epistemic modal operators by default take type-lifted arguments--that is, sets of propositions rather than bare propositions. Reply: but the Hamblin Type-shift will make it the case that bare propositions are also (singleton) sets of propositions. Counter-reply: ok, well, I was considering an alternative semantics in which the type-lift doesn't occur until the derivation hits an operator that demands it: that means that, when [[Might]] hits a set {p1, p2} of propositions, it will try to compose with the whole unit before trying to compose with the individual disjuncts. Since it CAN compose with the whole unit, that's what it will do--it will never go to the fallback step. (Simons thinks that it does, sometimes, but I don't think so.)

Q) How devastating is it, for Simons, that on her semantics [[must]] and [[might]] aren't duals?

A) It's not so good, but note that in her favor they do come out duals in the single-proposition case: that's the case about which we have the strongest prima facie intuitions.

Counter-answer) Yeah, but, those negations of the second type (``You can't take French or Spanish, you HAVE to take Spanish") sound awfully metalinguistic!

[what is the status of metalinguistic negation...?]

Intriguing Quotes Dept.: Dummett

[why not rely on a "know it when you see it" characterization of proper names--as Frege apparently did?]

"It is not merely that there would be a great many borderline cases which some would be inclined to accept as proper names and others to reject, with no principle on which either could defend his judgment. It is, rather, that such an account would be unable to display the connection between the classification of some expressions as proper names and the use of those expressions. Being funny and being red are detachable qualities: someone with no sense of humor or someone totally color-blind misses a lot, but there is nothing else which we can infer that he misses in virtue of his missing these things. By contrast, someone who cannot recognize an expression as a proper name must either fail to understand the expression, or else must simply fail to grasp the concept `proper name' but yet be capable of coming to grasp it. Of someone totally color-blind we may well say that he is never capable of acquiring the concept red: but someone who understand language must already have that by means of which he could come to learn which expressions are proper names and which are not, if we could but find the correct means to explain this concept to him."

Dummett, Frege: phil. lang, 55

Things I would like to know:

1) What typed lambda-calculus has to do with avoiding set-theoretic paradoxes.

2) What assignments have to do with different ways of stating the recursive truth-conditions for the Universal and Existential quantifiers.

3)

Inconclusive Conclusions II

Thisness and Vagueness

Forbes, Synthese, Jstor not working, wtf?!?!

Inconclusive Conclusions I

Schiffer's wide-scoping objection and Heck's we-don't-even-need-wide-scoping objection.