Colloquium: Kai von Fintel (MIT) – 1/25

Speaker: Kai von Fintel (MIT)
When: Friday, 1/25 at 3:30 pm
Where: Education 433
Title: Hedging your ifs and vice versa

Abstract: (For an explanation of this abstract click this link.)

How does the word “if” help things we say mean what they mean? It can work together with other words like “maybe” and “probably” to make things we say less strong. But how does it do that?

Many people have tried to find out how this works, but we will show that they face a big problem when one looks at people talking to each other and pointing to things the other said.

Can we do better?

Alternate Abstract:

We show that the interaction of probability operators and conditionals is even more problematic than previously realized. We try to rescue the restrictor approach (Lewis-Kratzer) to “if”-clauses. Do we succeed?

Published
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McLing
on January 21, 2013
in Colloquia and Talks
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