Abstract
I present data that suggest the universal entailments of counterfactual donkey sentencesaren’t as universal as some have claimed. I argue that this favors the strategy of attributingthese entailments to a special property of the similarity ordering on worlds provided bysome contexts, rather than to a semantically encoded sensitivity to assignment.Keywords: donkey sentences, counterfactuals, conditionals, similarity, simplification.
Highlights
There are various approaches to counterfactuals, indefinites, and donkey pronouns which we might try out in dealing with counterfactual donkey sentences
I will limit the current discussion to the ordering semantics approach to counterfactuals developed by Stalnaker and Lewis3 and dynamic binding approach to indefinites and donkey pronouns based on ideas in Groenendijk and Stokhof (1991) and Groenendijk et al (1996)
Overall similarity in matters of fact may matter, but only a little. This should be enough to get us going, but we’ll come back to this issue in §2.1, where we introduce a new proposal about how similarity is determined
Summary
There are various approaches to counterfactuals, indefinites, and donkey pronouns which we might try out in dealing with counterfactual donkey sentences. I will limit the current discussion to the ordering semantics approach to counterfactuals developed by Stalnaker and Lewis and dynamic binding approach to indefinites and donkey pronouns based on ideas in Groenendijk and Stokhof (1991) and Groenendijk et al (1996).. We will introduce an account of counterfactual donkey sentences which is a straightforward combination of the ordering semantics for counterfactuals and the dynamic binding account of indefinites and pronouns This is the proposal given in Wang (2009), except where she moves to a test semantics based on Veltman (2005), we’ll stick more closely to the traditional idea of a counterfactual being truth conditional (which, in our dynamic framework, amounts to being eliminative). Most—among them how to deal with ‘weak’ readings, modal subordination, and might-counterfactuals—I will have leave aside for as we turn to the one that will occupy us for the remainder of the paper
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