Abstract

The ‘if p , ought p ’ problem, famously known as Zvolenszky’s puzzle (Zvolenszky 2002), questions whether possible world semantics can assign proper truth conditions to sentences of the form ‘if p , ought p ’. This paper suggests that it is not a problem of possible worlds semantics of modality, but rather, the ‘if p , ought p ’ problem reveals the counterfactual nature of deontic modals which otherwise would have gone unnoticed. I propose that a counterfactual-based formulation of deontic necessity that implements intervention, jointly with the assumption that indicative conditionals facilitate backtracking, offers a principled solution to the ‘if p , ought p ’ problem. I also present empirical evidence in favor of an interventionist approach to counterfactuals as opposed to similarity-based theories, at least in the domain of deontic reasoning. EARLY ACCESS

Highlights

  • Suppose that Britney Spears has a contract with Pepsi, requiring that she does not drink non-Pepsi cola in public

  • This paper proposes that deontic modals involve counterfactual reasoning, picking out the best worlds among the counterfactual prejacent-worlds and the counterfactual alternative-to-the-prejacent-worlds

  • The upshot for the theory of modality is that for intuitively true cases of ‘if p, must/should/ought p’ discussed in Zvolenszky (2002) and Carr (2014), we can set up a coherent modal background of the deontic modal

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Summary

Introduction

Suppose that Britney Spears has a contract with Pepsi, requiring that she does not drink non-Pepsi cola in public. Zvolenszky argues that possible worlds semantics fails to correctly predict the truth conditions of the ‘if p, ought p’ sentences because the flipside examples are identical in structure to the Coca-Cola example. One can respond to Zvolenszky in the following way: considering that the Dalai Lama only gets angry for a good reason, if he is angry there must have been a good reason for him to be angry Given such a circumstance, ‘he should be angry’ is intuitively true. The standard account does not offer a good explanation of why the dependencies have to be ignored and why there is no reading in which they are considered as relevant My take on this issue is that the double modalization strategy is not the source of the problem.

Preliminary: the standard account of modality
Zvolenszky’s puzzle
The prominent response overgenerates
The prominent response is forced to ignore certain factual dependencies
Proposal
An interventionist view of counterfactuals
The semantics of ought
Analysis
Why Death is still in Aleppo and the Dalai Lama is rightfully angry
Avoiding overgeneration
Interventionist approach or similarity-based semantics?
Modified love triangle
Interventionist approaches are more flexible in picking up facts
10 Conclusion
Full Text
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