14.30 – 15.30: Kit Fine (NYU): A Truthmaker Semantics for Conditional Imperatives
15.30 – 15.45: Coffee Break
15.45 - 16.45: Friederike Moltmann (CNRS): Underspecification of Attitudes and Truthmaker Semantics
16.45-17.00: Coffee Break
17.00 – 18.00: Louis de Rosset (University of Vermont): Truthmaker Semantics for the Impure Logic of Ground
18.00-18.15: Coffee Break
18.15 – 19.15: Cian Dorr (NYU): Truthmaking in the Object Language
I provide a truth-maker semantics for conditional imperatives and indicate how it might be extended to other conditional constructions.
It has been argued that the satisfaction conditions of a desire can be underspecified by the complement clause. This provides support for the view according to which the complement clause gives a partial content of the reported desire, where partial content is formulated in terms of truthmaker theory. In this talk, I will discuss the extent of such underspecification and whether it truly supports a truthmaker-based approach to the content of attitudes.
Optional preparatory reading here.
I will describe a semantics for ground developed jointly with Kit Fine. The semantics interprets a language expressing connections of ground among negations, conjunctions, and disjunctions. I will draw contrasts between this interpretation and the standard truthmaker semantics for ground, but argue that these divergences are less significant that they might have appeared at first glance.
I consider a simple language with Boolean connectives, sentential variables and quantifiers binding them, and a connective for propositional identity (‘for it to be the case that … is for it to be the case that …’). Using familiar techniques, the possible-worlds model theory for such a language can be ‘internalised’ to derive a theory stated in the language itself, based on the definition of ‘world-proposition’ as ‘maximal consistent proposition’, and this theory can be shown to follow from the theory that propositions form a complete atomic Boolean algebra. In this paper, I will consider to what extent something similar can be done for Fine’s truthmaker semantics. This will involve looking for a way of picking out a class of special propositions to serve as surrogates for the states, and a binary relation among propositions to serve as a surrogate for the verification relation, and using these definitions to rewrite the metalinguistic definition of a model as theory in the object-language. I will make a start at considering to what extent the axioms of this theory can be derived from an independently natural weakening of the theory that propositions form a complete atomic Boolean algebra.