Counterfactual scorekeeping

Counterfactual Skepticism and Multidimensional Semantics

“…4 I am not the first to respond to counterfactual skepticism. To take just a few examples, David Lewis (1979), Anthony Gillies (2007), Robbie Williams (2008), Jonathan Ichikawa (2011), Hannes Leitgeb (2012aLeitgeb ( , 2012b, Sarah Moss (2012Moss ( , 2013, Moritz Schulz (2014), and Karen Lewis (2016) all offer responses to arguments for counterfactual skepticism. While these proposals are certainly very interesting and worthy of a detailed discussion, I will have to set them aside in this paper, due to lack of space.…”

Lessons from Sobel sequences

“…Taking inspiration from von Fintel's (2001) and Gillies's (2007) analyses of counterfactuals, I treat indicative conditionals as strict material conditionals over a domain that evolves as discourse proceeds. 10 While the basic idea could be articulated in different ways, I choose here a dynamic semantic implementation that construes the meaning of a sentence in terms of its context change potential.…”

“…early access Malte Willer framework that has been developed in the previous section, and the resulting analysis of counterfactuals is very much in the spirit of the proposal laid out by von Fintel (2001) and Gillies (2007) (though again see Willer 2013b for remarks on differences at crucial levels of detail).…”

Iffiness

“…For more on context-dependent strictness (of different flavors) see, e.g., Veltman 1985, von Fintel 1998a, and Gillies 2004, 2007. 23 Thus, given well-behavedness (Definition 3.2), explaining Fact 2 is easy for widescoping egalitarians: if p q is equivalent to must (p ⊃ q) which, given well-behavedness, is equivalent to must must (p ⊃ q).…”

“…For a recent discussion see Rawlins 2008. 33 The general idea that consequents are evaluated in a subordinate or derived context is standard in dynamic semantics -see, e.g., dynamic treatments of donkey anaphora (Groenendijk & Stokhof 1991) or dynamic treatments of presupposition projection in conditional antecedents and consequents (Heim 1992;Beaver 1999) or dynamic treatments of counterfactuals (Veltman 2005;von Fintel 2001;Gillies 2007). But exploiting a derived context isn't quite a litmus test for dynamics since that is something shared by a lot of Ramsey-inspired accounts, whether or not they count as 'dynamic'.…”