{"title":"Intervention in deontic reasoning","authors":"Woojin Chung","doi":"10.3765/sp.13.16","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The ‘if p , ought p ’ problem, famously known as Zvolenszky’s puzzle (Zvolenszky 2002), questions whether possible world semantics can assign proper truth conditions to sentences of the form ‘if p , ought p ’. This paper suggests that it is not a problem of possible worlds semantics of modality, but rather, the ‘if p , ought p ’ problem reveals the counterfactual nature of deontic modals which otherwise would have gone unnoticed. I propose that a counterfactual-based formulation of deontic necessity that implements intervention, jointly with the assumption that indicative conditionals facilitate backtracking, offers a principled solution to the ‘if p , ought p ’ problem. I also present empirical evidence in favor of an interventionist approach to counterfactuals as opposed to similarity-based theories, at least in the domain of deontic reasoning. \n \nEARLY ACCESS","PeriodicalId":45550,"journal":{"name":"Semantics & Pragmatics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2020-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Semantics & Pragmatics","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.13.16","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The ‘if p , ought p ’ problem, famously known as Zvolenszky’s puzzle (Zvolenszky 2002), questions whether possible world semantics can assign proper truth conditions to sentences of the form ‘if p , ought p ’. This paper suggests that it is not a problem of possible worlds semantics of modality, but rather, the ‘if p , ought p ’ problem reveals the counterfactual nature of deontic modals which otherwise would have gone unnoticed. I propose that a counterfactual-based formulation of deontic necessity that implements intervention, jointly with the assumption that indicative conditionals facilitate backtracking, offers a principled solution to the ‘if p , ought p ’ problem. I also present empirical evidence in favor of an interventionist approach to counterfactuals as opposed to similarity-based theories, at least in the domain of deontic reasoning.
EARLY ACCESS