TY - JOUR
T1 - Two switches in the theory of counterfactuals
T2 - A study of truth conditionality and minimal change
AU - Ciardelli, Ivano
AU - Zhang, Linmin
AU - Champollion, Lucas
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements Champollion et al. (2016) is an earlier version of the first part of this paper. For comments and discussion, we thank Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Rebekah Baglini, Justin Bledin, Joseph DeVeaugh-Geiss, Kit Fine, Ethan Jerzak, Angelika Kratzer, Dan Lassiter, Johannes Marti, Robert van Rooij, Paolo Santorio, Katrin Schulz, Anna Szabolcsi, Frank Veltman, Malte Willer, and audiences at New York University, Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 26), the Fourth Workshop on Natural Language and Computer Science (NLCS 2016), the Workshop on Logic and Algorithms in Computational Linguistics (LACL 2017), the Philosophy meets Linguistics workshop in Zürich, the Workshop on Inquisitiveness Below and Beyond the Sentence Boundary (InqBnB1), the conference on Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics (LENLS 14), and in Utrecht, Paris, Göttingen, Harvard University, and Fudan University (Shanghai), as well as two anonymous reviewers and the editor, Stefan Kaufmann. Special thanks to Floris Roelof-sen. Ivano Ciardelli’s research was financially supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 680220). Lucas Champollion gratefully acknowledges financial support from the University Research Challenge Fund (URCF) at New York University.
PY - 2018/12/1
Y1 - 2018/12/1
N2 - Based on a crowdsourced truth value judgment experiment, we provide empirical evidence challenging two classical views in semantics, and we develop a novel account of counterfactuals that combines ideas from inquisitive semantics and causal reasoning. First, we show that two truth-conditionally equivalent clauses can make different semantic contributions when embedded in a counterfactual antecedent. Assuming compositionality, this means that the meaning of these clauses is not fully determined by their truth conditions. This finding has a clear explanation in inquisitive semantics: truth-conditionally equivalent clauses may be associated with different propositional alternatives, each of which counts as a separate counterfactual assumption. Second, we show that our results contradict the common idea that the interpretation of a counterfactual involves minimizing change with respect to the actual state of affairs. We propose to replace the idea of minimal change by a distinction between foreground and background for a given counterfactual assumption: the background is held fixed in the counterfactual situation, while the foreground can be varied without any minimality constraint.
AB - Based on a crowdsourced truth value judgment experiment, we provide empirical evidence challenging two classical views in semantics, and we develop a novel account of counterfactuals that combines ideas from inquisitive semantics and causal reasoning. First, we show that two truth-conditionally equivalent clauses can make different semantic contributions when embedded in a counterfactual antecedent. Assuming compositionality, this means that the meaning of these clauses is not fully determined by their truth conditions. This finding has a clear explanation in inquisitive semantics: truth-conditionally equivalent clauses may be associated with different propositional alternatives, each of which counts as a separate counterfactual assumption. Second, we show that our results contradict the common idea that the interpretation of a counterfactual involves minimizing change with respect to the actual state of affairs. We propose to replace the idea of minimal change by a distinction between foreground and background for a given counterfactual assumption: the background is held fixed in the counterfactual situation, while the foreground can be varied without any minimality constraint.
KW - Causal reasoning
KW - Counterfactuals
KW - Crowdsourcing survey
KW - Disjunctive antecedents
KW - Experimental semantics
KW - Inquisitive semantics
KW - Minimal change semantics
KW - Ordering semantics
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U2 - 10.1007/s10988-018-9232-4
DO - 10.1007/s10988-018-9232-4
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85048560110
VL - 41
SP - 577
EP - 621
JO - Linguistics and Philosophy
JF - Linguistics and Philosophy
SN - 0165-0157
IS - 6
ER -