Alternatives in Counterfactuals

What Is Right and What Is Not

Bibliographic Data

ID22882201
AuthorsJacopo Romoli (0000-0003-2165-4559, University of Bergen), Paolo Santorio (0000-0001-6840-7630, University of Maryland, College Park), Eva Wittenberg (0000-0002-3188-6145, Central European University, Vienna)
Year2022
Volume39
Issue2
Pages213-260
Publication date2022-05-10
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Semantics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0167-5133 • E-ISSN: 1477-4593
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/jos/ffab023
OpenAlexW4205090108
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited50

Classical semantics for counterfactuals is based on a notion of minimal change: If ${\textsf {A}}$, would ${\textsf {C}}$ says that the worlds that make ${\textsf {A}}$ true and that are otherwise minimally different from the actual world are ${\textsf {C}}$-worlds. This semantics suffers from a well-known difficulty with disjunctive antecedents (see e.g. Alonso-Ovalle, 2009; Willer, 2018; Santorio, 2018, a.o.). In a recent study, Ciardelli, Zhang, and Champollion (Ciardelli et al., 2018b; henceforth, CZC) present new, related difficulties for the classical approach having to do with unpredicted differences between counterfactuals with De Morgan-equivalent antecedents, and related pattern of inferences. They propose a new semantics for counterfactuals, which builds on inquisitive semantics (see Ciardelli et al., 2018a) and gives up on minimal change. Building on this debate, we report on a series of experiments that investigate the role of overt negation in this data. Our results replicate CZC’s main effects, but they also indicate that those effects are linked to the presence of overt negation. We propose a novel account, based on three key assumptions: (i) the semantics for counterfactuals does involve a notion of minimal change, after all; (ii) the meanings of disjunction and negation are associated with alternatives, which interact with the meaning of counterfactuals; (iii) the alternatives generated by negation are partially determined by the question under discussion (QUD). We compare our account with other existing accounts, including CZC’s own proposal, as well as Schulz (2019) and Bar-Lev & Fox (2020) ones.

Counterfactual conditional · Counterfactual thinking · Epistemology · Linguistics · Meaning (existential) · Negation · Programming language · Semantics (computer science) · Advanced Algebra and Logic · Computer Science · Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge · Mathematics · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science

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