Time and location
Friday, 14-16, room 0.28, Ludwigstraße 31
Program outline
(might be updated as the course proceeds)
20 Oct. Intro. The importance of conditionals. Ontic vs epistemic conditionals.
Material: slides, Adams 1970.
27 Oct. The meta-linguistic theory.
Material: slides, Goodman 1947.
03 Nov. Lewis’s minimal change semantics.
Material: Lewis 1973, ch. 1.
10 Nov. Selection functions and Stalnaker’s theory.
Material: Lewis 1973 (Sec. 2.4 and 2.7), Stalnaker 1968.
Commentator: Jung-Kuan
24 Nov. Limit assumption and conditional excluded middle.
Material: slides, Lewis 1973 (Sec. 3.4), Stalnaker 1980.
Commentator: Maksim
01 Dec. The problem of disjunctive antecedents. Alonso-Ovalle’s proposal.
Material: slides, Fine 1975; Alonso-Ovalle 2009.
Commentator: Ramón
08 Dec. Breaking de Morgan’s law in antecedents; inquisitive lifting.
Material: slides1, slides2, Champollion et. al. 2016; Ciardelli 2016.
15 Dec. The problems of similarity.
Fine 1975; Tichy 1976; Lewis 1979; Veltman 2005 (Sec. 2).
12 Jan. Counterfactuals in discourse and modal horizons.
Material: slides, von Fintel 2001.
19 Jan. Back to facts and laws: Veltman’s update semantics.
Veltman 2005.
26 Jan. The problem of the asymmetry of laws. Causal modeling semantics.
Schulz 2011. Pearl 2000. Briggs 2012, Sec. 1.3.
Commentator: Xinghan
02 Feb. An instance of non-minimal change. Background semantics.
Ciardelli et. al. 2018. slides.
Commentator: Milana.
09 Feb. – Extending causal modeling semantics.
Briggs 2012.
16 Feb. – Wrapping up and some open questions.
(non-exaustive) list of possible essay topics