Counterfactuals in Possibility Semantics

Paolo Santorio (University of California, San Diego, University of California, San Diego), Paolo Santorio

Paolo Santorio (UC San Diego) will present "Counterfactuals in Possibility Semantics" at 11 on 7 September in Old Arts 209.

Abstract: Recent work on epistemic modality has raised substantial challenges to truth-conditional theories of epistemic modals. At the same time, Lewis's truth-conditional account has remained the dominant view of counterfactuals in philosophy and semantics. I argue that the challenges against truth-conditional views of epistemic modals straightforwardly generalize to the case of counterfactuals and encourage a nonclassical treatment. Interestingly, the resulting semantics can be interpreted either as a straightforward generalization of dynamic/expressivist semantics for modality, or as a kind of possibility semantics, i.e. a semantics that exploits regions rather than points in logical space.