Katrin Scultz, from the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation
at the University of Amsterdam, will give a talk in the linguistics
department this tuesday:
Tuesday May 5th
at 11:00am
in the seminar room of the Linguistics department
"If you wiggle A, then B will change. On causal conditionals - again"
Katrin Schultz, ILLC, UvA
Abstract:
In this talk I will propose that the dominant reading of
(counterfactual conditionals) can best be described as based on a
causal notion of consequence. I will propose a formalization of such
a notion of consequence building on ideas borrowed from logic
programming. We will then discuss two ways to use this notion of
consequence in a formal account of the meaning of conditionals. The
first one, proposed in Schulz 2007, has been recently criticized by
Sarah Moss. I will discuss her counterexamples and develop an
alternative approach that can deal with the shortcomings of the
first proposal.