Decision Theory: Yes! Truth Conditions: No!

Charlow, Nate

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198717928.003.0003

Cited by 31 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 50 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…If

a_{1} \leq_{s} a_{2}

then performing a 2 is at least as good as performing a 1 in light of the decision‐maker's information state s , her preferences over the obtainable outcomes, and her method of choosing between the available options. In an earlier version of this paper (Bledin ), I further unpacked this evaluation of the options by working with more finely‐grained decision‐theoretic structures (drawing on proposals by Carr ; Charlow ; Lassiter ). However, we don't really need the full resources of statistical decision theory to bring out the core features of my diagnosis of the Idle Argument.…”

Section: Formalizing the Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The new Idle Argument involves or not unconditionals like (i-a), a subspecies of alternative unconditionals. 5 The Fatalist could also have run his argument using weak necessity modals like ought or should but these are often taken to be paraphrasable in terms of comparative goodness anyway-"You should stay put" arguably means "Staying where you are is better than not" (Kratzer 1991;Charlow 2016). 6 The conditional here might be regarded as an extra premise, but I do not require that the Fatalist derive the non-parenthetical conditional from it.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Fatalist could also have run his argument using weak necessity modals like ought or should but these are often taken to be paraphrasable in terms of comparative goodness anyway—“You should stay put” arguably means “Staying where you are is better than not” (Kratzer ; Charlow ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, modeling an information state using a nonempty set of worlds effectively presupposes that this information is consistent and closed under entailment. These rationality‐embedding structures are required because our concept of a deductively good argument—reflected in basic intuitions about what follows from what—packs in various rationality assumptions (see Charlow for helpful related discussion). There is a sense in which logic is already “normative” at this boiler‐room level.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Fatalism and the Logic of Unconditionals

Bledin

2018

Nous

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this paper, I consider a variant of the ancient Idle Argument involving so‐called “unconditionals” with interrogative antecedents. This new Idle Argument provides an ideal setting for probing the logic of these close relatives of if‐conditionals, which has been comparatively underexplored. In the course of refuting the argument, I argue that contrary to received wisdom, many unconditionals do not entail their main clauses, yet modus ponens is still unrestrictedly valid for this class of expressions. I make these lessons precise in a formal system drawing on recent work in inquisitive semantics. My larger aim is to challenge standard truth preservation accounts of logic and deductive argumentation.

show abstract

“…If

a_{1} \leq_{s} a_{2}

Section: Formalizing the Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Fatalism and the Logic of Unconditionals

Bledin

2018

Nous

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Hart () distinguishes internal and external legal statements, and Toh () argues for expressivism about internal legal statements. There is also recent work on expressivism about deontic modals (Charlow ). The distinction between committed and uncommitted uses arguably exists in evaluative sentences (Egan , p. 251).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Pejorative Discourse Is Not Fictional

Marques

2017

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Hom and May (2015) argue that pejoratives mean negative prescriptive properties that externally depend on social ideologies, and that this entails a form of fictionalism: pejoratives have null extensions. There are relevant uses of fictional terms that are necessary to describe the content of fictions, and to make true statements about the world, that do not convey that speakers are committed to the fiction. This paper shows that the same constructions with pejoratives typically convey that the speaker is committed to racist ideologies, in contrast with fictional discourse that typically does not. The disanalogy undermines the plausibility of fictionalism about pejoratives. Moreover, the exceptions—uncommitted uses in embedded constructions—display features that conflict with Hom and May's explanation of committed uses as conversational implicatures.

show abstract

Weak Necessity

Rubinstein

2020

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Getting the meaning of ought right and accounting for its relation to must has proven to be a considerable challenge for deontic logic as well as formal semantic analyses of modality. This chapter aims to give a language‐independent characterization of weak necessity as a phenomenon of gradable modality, focusing on morphological, semantic, and discursive properties of modals like ought . Weak necessity requires us to distinguish between degrees of necessity. Two theoretical frameworks for doing so are evaluated in the chapter. The two frameworks are shown to have complementary strengths, highlighting the distinction between probability‐based weak necessities and priority‐oriented ones.

show abstract

Decision Theory: Yes! Truth Conditions: No!

Cited by 31 publications

References 50 publications

Fatalism and the Logic of Unconditionals

Fatalism and the Logic of Unconditionals

Pejorative Discourse Is Not Fictional

Weak Necessity

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About