Speaker: Lucas Champollion (NYU)
Title: The Limits of Possible Worlds Semantics
Time: Friday, October 20th, 3:30pm – 5pm
Location: 32-141
Abstract: The standard paradigm of possible world semantics fails to account for the subject-matter preserving nature of entailment and for discrepancies between connectives in propositional logic and in natural language. These discrepancies show up in empirical domains such as imperatives and counterfactuals. This calls for a paradigm shift towards a hyperintensional framework. I adopt unilateral truthmaker semantics in the sense of Fine (2017), with a concomitant move from intersective to collective conjunction. I conceptualize truthmakers as Davidsonian events. This yields a natural conception of negative events. I sketch an application to perception reports. (Partly based on joint work with Timothée Bernard.)