Original scientific paper
Becker, Ramsey, and Hi-world Semantics. Toward a Unified Account of Conditionals
Cheng-Chih Tsai
orcid.org/0000-0001-8074-9414
; Mackay Medical College, New Taipei City, Taiwan
Abstract
In Lowe (1995), instead of endorsing a Stalnaker/Lewis-style account of counterfactuals, E. J. Lowe claims that a variation of C. I. Lewis’s strict implication alone captures the essence of everyday conditionals and avoids the paradoxes of strict implication. However, Lowe’s approach fails to account for the validity of simple and straightforward arguments such as ‘if 2=3 then 2+1=3+1’, and Heylen & Horsten (2006) even claims that no variation of strict implication can successfully describe the logical behavior of natural language conditionals. By incorporating the German logician O. Becker’s modal intuition with the insight of Ramsey’s Test, we show that there does exist a unifi ed, strict-conditional based account of everyday conditionals, which withstands all attacks previously raised against truth-conditional accounts of conditionals. Furthermore, a subtle distinction between autistic and realistic readings of the indexical ‘I’ involved in a conditional helps us resolve a recent debate concerning
the Thomason conditionals.
Keywords
Becker’s Semantics; Ramsey’s Test; Hi-world Semantics; Moore’s Principles; Thomason conditionals
Hrčak ID:
180022
URI
Publication date:
11.4.2016.
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