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Colloquium: Paolo Santorio
October 2, 2015, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Linguistics colloquium: Paolo Santorio, University of Leeds
“Alternatives and Truthmakers in Conditional Semantics”
Abstract: Most contemporary theories of conditionals in semantics are descendants of Stanaker/Lewis/Kratzer’s comparative closeness analysis. I start by revisiting a classical problem for this analysis: conditionals with disjunctive antecedents (“if p or q, r”) seem to entail the two conditionals whose antecedents are the individual disjuncts (“if p, r” and “if q, r”); yet comparative closeness semantics can’t vindicate this entailment. It is often assumed that the puzzle of disjunctive antecedents can be accommodated via one of two local fixes: (a) a scalar implicature in the antecedent of the conditional, or (b) a non-Boolean meaning for “or”. I show that none of these two strategies can work. Hence the puzzle seems to require modifying the basic comparative closeness account. I suggest an analysis on which conditionals are alternative-sensitive: their truth conditions are computed in part by manipulating syntactic alternatives to the antecedent. Crucially, the algorithm for manipulating alternatives is different from the so-called “innocent excludability” algorithm in use for scalar implicatures, and involves a new notion that I call “specificity”. The resulting semantics for conditionals is hyperintensional (it doesn’t vindicate substitution of necessarily equivalent propositions), but in a way that is different from, and much tamer than, other hyperintensional accounts.