Martin Aher
(Uni Osnabrück)
Some Funny Cases of Implication
November 16th at 17:30, in Science Park D1.113
Semanticists have struggled to account for indicative conditionals such as the following: "If you drop a stone, it will fall to the ground."
I will review the literature on conditionals starting with puzzles of material implication to see where the logical properties of implication cause trouble for natural language semantics far removed from conditionals themselves.
The talk emphasizes the natural language phenomena and explores the wide range of proposals in the literature. If there is time, the talk will discuss the impact of the puzzles of implication on the semantics of deontic modals.
The talk will be accessible to people outside of the field of natural language semantics.