Our next workshop will take place on March 12, 2024, at the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University Bratislava.
Abstracts
Marie Duží & Bjørn Jespersen: Reasoning from the Absurd: Initial Steps Toward a Sketch of an Outline
This talk presents the first steps toward developing a TIL theory of counterpossibles, counterfactuals with an impossible antecedent. We suggest that this theory needs to be hyperintensional. We begin by summarizing the standard TIL analysis of intensional counterfactuals. The analysis centres around a procedure producing a proposition (truth-condition) that takes the value True if the antecedent implies a consequent in all the possible worlds that differ from the actual one, except that the antecedent is true. However, this conception yields vacuism (vacuous truth) in the case of an impossible antecedent. The most common nonvacuist solution revolves around impossible worlds, points of evaluation at which the impossible antecedent can be true. However, we are not going to adopt impossible worlds. Instead, we wish to develop a structuralist alternative to our circumstantialist rival. Our working hypothesis is this. If there is a link of conceptual relevance between the impossible antecedent and the consequent, then the so produced proposition is true, provided the consequent is true, otherwise false. This work is a further contribution to the ongoing TIL-based inquiry into various notions of impossibility. The most recent results can be found in the paper ‘Impossibilities without impossibilia’, forthcoming in Inquiry.
Lukáš Bielik: What Could a (Hyperintensional) Theory of Counterfactuals Take into Account?
In my talk, I focus on several issues that have emerged in discussions on the semantics of counterfactuals since the mid-twentieth century. Since Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL) is a logico-semantic system with significant expressive power, it is of interest to explore how TIL can contribute to solving several traditional problems in the semantics of counterfactuals. Some of the problems and solutions have already been outlined by P. Tichý in (1978) and (1984), others are still under discussion. The presentation gives prominence to some theoretical desiderata that hyperintensional semantics could take into account in building a systematic theory of counterfactuals.
(presentation: Lukáš Bielik, "What Could a Hyperintensional Theory of Counterfactuals Take into Account?")