Meaning Meeting - Paolo Santorio / Future-Less-Vivid conditionals and branching worlds
Meaning Meeting - Paolo Santorio / Future-Less-Vivid conditionals and branching worlds
October 23, the Meaning Meeting has Paolo Santorio, discussing Future-Less-Vivid conditionals: conditionals that display typical counterfactual morphology, and whose antecedent has future reference time, such as: "If Ada took semantics next term, she would take logic next year." Argues Paolo:
"The generalization universally adopted in the literature is that FLVs cannot express contrary-to-fact suppositions. In fact, FLVs seemingly have truth conditions that are very close to those of the corresponding will-conditionals, aside from an ill-understood "remoteness" inference. I show that this generalization is wrong. FLVs can be genuinely counterfactual, though in a somewhat limited way: FLVs can involve contrary-to-fact suppositions about the future, though not about the past. This empirical observation suggests a general theoretical point. The behavior of FLVs is challenging for all semantics based on so-called branching worlds models, which are popular in the literature. Conversely, it can be easily accommodated by theories that assume that "would"-conditionals quantify over a broader domain."