17.1268, Books: Semantics/Syntax: Gauker

Wed Apr 26 15:28:46 UTC 2006

LINGUIST List: Vol-17-1268. Wed Apr 26 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.1268, Books: Semantics/Syntax: Gauker

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1)
Date: 26-Apr-2006
From: Vincent Scorziello < gigivida at mit.edu >
Subject: Conditionals in Context: Gauker 

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 11:25:13
From: Vincent Scorziello < gigivida at mit.edu >
Subject: Conditionals in Context: Gauker 

Title: Conditionals in Context 
Publication Year: 2005 
Publisher: MIT Press
	   http://mitpress.mit.edu/

Book URL: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10699 

Author: Christopher Gauker

Hardback: ISBN: 0262072661 Pages: 344 Price: U.S. $ 75.00
Hardback: ISBN: 0262072661 Pages: 344 Price: U.K. £ 48.95
Paperback: ISBN: 0262572311 Pages: 344 Price: U.S. $ 35.00
Paperback: ISBN: 0262572311 Pages: 344 Price: U.K. £ 22.95

Abstract:

"If you turn left at the next corner, you will see a blue house at the end of
the street." That sentence - a conditional - might be true even though it is
possible that you will not see a blue house at the end of the street when you
turn left at the next corner. A moving van may block your view; the house may
have been painted pink; a crow might swoop down and peck out your eyes. Still,
in some contexts, we might ignore these possibilities and correctly assert the
conditional. In this book, Christopher Gauker argues that such
context-relativity is the key to understanding the semantics of conditionals.
Contexts are defined as objective features of the situation in which a
conversation takes place, and the semantic properties of sentences -
conditionals included - are defined in terms of assertibility in a context.

One of the primary goals of a theory of conditionals has to be to distinguish
correctly between valid and invalid arguments containing conditionals. According
to Gauker, an argument is valid if the conclusion is assertible in every context
in which the premises are assertible. This runs counter to what Gauker sees as a
systematic misreading of the data by other authors, who judge arguments to be
invalid if they can think of a context in which the premises are judged true and
some other context in which the conclusion is judged false. Different schools of
thought on conditionals reflect fundamentally different approaches to semantics.
Gauker offers his theory as a motive and test case for a distinctive kind of
semantics that dispenses with reference relations and possible worlds.

Table of Contents:
1.1	The Context-Relativity of Conditionals	3
1.2	Conversations in the Abstract	9
1.3	Primitive Cotexts	12
1.4	Multicontexts and Conditionals	16
1.5	Indicative Conditionals versus Material Conditionals	24
1.6	Subjuctive Conditionals	25
1.7	Strong Assertibility	31
1.8	Two Stipulations	33
1.9	Foundations	36
1.10	My Argumentative Strategy	45
2	The Concept of Logical Validity	47
2.1	Arguments versus Inferences	49
2.2	Validity as a Matter of Form	52
2.3	The Model-Theoretic Conception of Validity	55
2.4	The Context-Logical Conception of Logical Validity	73
2.5	Does This Conception Do Any Better?	79
2.6	Conditionals as Context-Relative Rules of Inference	82
3	A Catalog of Argument Forms	83
4	Critical Comparisons	127
4.1	The Received View	130
4.2	Stalnaker's Theory	135
4.3	The Barwise-Lycan Theory	162
4.4	Lowe's Theory	170
4.5	Veltman's Theory	172
5	The Core Theory	177
5.1	Definitions and Conditions	177
5.2	Examples	181
5.3	Some Basic Theorems	187
5.4	A Key Result	192
5.5	The Rationales for Certain Features	193
5.6	Some Shortcomings of the Core Theory	203
6	Two Enhancements	205
6.1	Strong Assertibility	205
6.2	Conditional Tautologies	219
7	Subjunctive Conditionals	225
7.1	The Grammatical Distinction	225
7.2	The Formal Theory of Subjunctive Conditionals	241
7.3	Examples	245
7.4	A Couple of Enhancements	249
8	"Even If", et cetera	253
8.1	"Even If"	254
8.2	Quantified Conditionals	272
8.3	"Only If"	277
8.4	Order Effects	280
8.5	Conditionals with Conditional Antecedents	284
9	Decidability	289
9.1	Preliminaries	290
9.2	The Algorithm	298
9.3	Examples	312
9.4	Why the Algorithm Works	314
	References
Download Chapter as PDF Sample Chapter - Download PDF (45 KB)	325
	Index
Download Chapter as PDF Sample Chapter - Download PDF (34 KB)	331 

Linguistic Field(s): Semantics
                     Syntax

Written In: English  (eng)

See this book announcement on our website: 
http://linguistlist.org/get-book.html?BookID=19301

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