Fabrizio Cariani | University of Maryland, College Park (original) (raw)

Papers by Fabrizio Cariani

Paradoxes of individual coherence (e.g., the preface paradox) and group coherence (e.g., the doct... more Paradoxes of individual coherence (e.g., the preface paradox) and group coherence (e.g., the doctrinal paradox) typically presuppose that deductive consistency is a coherence requirement for both individual and group judgment. In this paper, we introduce a new coherence requirement for (individual) full belief, and we explain how this new approach to individual coherence leads to an amelioration of the traditional paradoxes. In particular, we explain why our new coherence requirement gets around the standard doctrinal paradox. However, we also prove a new impossibility result, which reveals that (more complex) varieties of the doctrinal paradox can arise even for our new notion of coherence. * Draft: please do not cite or quote without permission.

Statements about the future are central in everyday conversation and reasoning. How should we un... more Statements about the future are central in everyday conversation and reasoning. How should we understand their meaning? The received view among philosophers treats will as a tense: in “Cynthia will pass her exam”, will shifts the reference time forward. Linguists, however, have produced substantial evidence for the view that will is a modal, on a par with must and would. The different accounts are designed to satisfy different theoretical constraints, apparently pulling in opposite directions. We show that these constraints are jointly satisfied by a novel modal account of will. On this account, will is a modal but doesn’t work as a quantifier over worlds. Rather, the meaning of will involves a selection function similar to the one used by Stalnaker in his semantics for conditionals. The resulting theory yields a plausible semantics and logic for will and vindicates our intuitive views about the attitudes that rational agents should have towards future-directed contents.

Contrastivists view "ought"-sentences as expressing comparisons among alternatives. Actualists be... more Contrastivists view "ought"-sentences as expressing comparisons among alternatives. Actualists believe that the value of each alternative in such a comparison is determined by what would actually happen if that alternative were to be the case. One of the arguments that motivates actualism is a challenge to the principle of agglomeration over conjunction—the principle according to which if you ought to run and you ought to smile, then you ought to run and smile. I argue that there is no way of developing the actualist insight into a logic that invalidates the agglomeration principle without also invalidating other desirable patterns of inference. After doing this, I extend the analysis to other contrastive views that challenge agglomeration in the way that the actualist does. This motivates skepticism about the actualist’s way of challenging agglomeration.

Modus ponens is the argument from premises of the form If A then B and A to the conclusion B (e.g... more Modus ponens is the argument from premises of the form If A then B and A to the conclusion B (e.g., from If it rained, Alicia got wet and It rained to Alicia got wet). Nearly all participants agree that the modus ponens conclusion logically follows when the argument appears in this Basic form. However, adding a further premise (e.g., If she forgot her umbrella, Alicia got wet) can lower participants’ rate of agreement—an effect called suppression. We propose a theory of suppression that draws on contemporary ideas about conditional sentences in linguistics and philosophy. Semantically, the theory assumes that people interpret an indicative conditional as a context-sensitive strict conditional: true if and only if its consequent is true in each of a contextually determined set of situations in which its antecedent is true. Pragmatically, the theory claims that context changes in response to new assertions, including new conditional premises. Thus, the conclusion of a modus ponens argument may no longer be accepted in the changed context. Psychologically, the theory describes people as capable of reasoning about broad classes of possible situations, ordered by typicality, without having to reason about individual possible worlds. The theory accounts for the main suppression phenomena, and it generates some novel predictions that new experiments confirm.

This paper motivates and develops a novel semantic framework for deontic modals. The framework is... more This paper motivates and develops a novel semantic framework for deontic modals. The framework is designed to shed light on two things: the relationship between deontic modals and substantive theories of practical rationality and the interaction of deon- tic modals with conditionals, epistemic modals and probability operators. I argue that, in order to model inferential connections between deontic modals and probability operators, we need more structure than is provided by classical intensional theories. In particular, we need probabilistic structure that interacts directly with the compositional semantics of de- ontic modals. However, I reject theories that provide this probabilistic structure by claiming that the semantics of deontic modals is linked to the Bayesian notion of expectation. I offer a probabilistic premise semantics that explains all the data that create trouble for the rival theories.

This paper explores two non-standard supermajority rules in the context of judgment aggregation ... more This paper explores two non-standard supermajority rules in the context of judgment aggregation over multiple logically connected issues. These rules set the supermajority threshold in a local, context sensitive way—partly as a function of the input profile of opinions. To motivate the interest of these rules, I prove two results. First, I characterize each rule in terms of a condi- tion I call ‘Block Preservation’. Block preservation says that if a majority of group members accept a judgment set, then so should the group. Second, I show that one of these rules is, in a precise sense, a judgment aggregation analogue of a rule for connecting qualitative and quantitative belief that has been recently defended by Hannes Leitgeb. The structural analogy is due to the fact that Leitgeb sets thresholds for qualitative beliefs in a local, context sensitive way—partly as a function of the given credence function.

Paradoxes of individual coherence (e.g., the preface paradox for individual judgment) and group c... more Paradoxes of individual coherence (e.g., the preface paradox for individual judgment) and group coherence (e.g., the doctrinal paradox for judgment aggregation) typically presuppose that deductive consistency is a coherence requirement for both individual and group judgment. In this paper, we introduce a new coherence requirement for (individual) full belief, and we explain how this new approach to individual coherence leads to an amelioration of the traditional paradoxes. In particular, we explain why our new coherence requirement gets around the standard doctrinal paradox. However, we also prove a new impossibility result, which reveals that (more complex) varieties of the doctrinal paradox can arise even for our new notion of coherence.

It has been recently suggested that a semantic theory for deontic modals should be neutral betwee... more It has been recently suggested that a semantic theory for deontic modals should be neutral between a very large range of normative and evaluative theories. This paper aims to get clear about this talk of neutrality, in particular about its scope and motivation. My thesis is that neutrality is best understood as an empirical thesis about a fragment of natural language that includes deontic modals—not as a new, sui generis methodological constraint on natural language semantics.

Probabilistic theories of ‘‘should” and ‘‘ought” face a predicament. At first blush, it seems tha... more Probabilistic theories of ‘‘should” and ‘‘ought” face a predicament. At first blush, it seems that such theories must provide different lexical entries for the epistemic and the deontic interpretations of these modals. I show that there is a new style of premise semantics that can avoid this consequence in an attractively conservative way.

Judgment aggregation is naturally applied to the modeling of collective attitudes. In the individ... more Judgment aggregation is naturally applied to the modeling of collective attitudes. In the individual case, we represent agents as having not just beliefs, but also as supporting them with reasons. Can the Judgment Aggregation help model a concept of collective reason? I argue that the resources of the standard judgment aggregation framework are insufficiently general. I develop a generalization of the framework that improves along this dimension. In the new framework, new aggregation rules become available, as well as a natural account of collective reasons.

We discuss the semantic significance of a puzzle concerning ‘ought’ and conditionals recently dis... more We discuss the semantic significance of a puzzle concerning ‘ought’ and conditionals recently discussed by Kolodny and MacFarlane. We argue that the puzzle is problematic for the standard Kratzer-style analysis of modality. In Kratzer’s seman- tics, modals are evaluated relative to a pair of conversational backgrounds. We show that there is no sensible way of assigning values to these conversational backgrounds so as to derive all of the intuitions in Kolodny and MacFarlane’s case. We show that the appropriate verdicts can be derived by extending Kratzer’s framework to feature a third conversational background and claiming that the relevant reading of ‘ought’ is sensitive to this parameter.

I motivate and characterize an intensional semantics for ‘ought’ on which it does not behave as a... more I motivate and characterize an intensional semantics for ‘ought’ on which it does not behave as a universal quantifier over possibilities. My motivational argument centers on taking at face value some standard challenges to the quantificational semantics, especially to the idea that ‘ought’-sentences satisfy the principle of Inheritance. I argue that standard pragmatic approaches to these puzzles are either not sufficiently detailed or unconvincing.

Synthese, 2008

Judgment aggregation problems are language dependent in that they may be framed in different yet ... more Judgment aggregation problems are language dependent in that they may be framed in different yet equivalent ways. We formalize this dependence via the notion of translation invariance, adopted from the philosophy of science, and we argue for the normative desirability of translation invariance. We characterize the class of translation invariant aggregation functions in the canonical judgment aggregation model, which requires collective judgments to be complete. Since there are reasonable translation invariant aggregation functions, our result can be viewed as a possibility theorem. At the same time, we show that translation invariance does have certain normatively undesirable consequences (e.g. failure of anonymity). We present a way of circumventing them by moving to a more general model of judgment aggregation, one that allows for incomplete collective judgments.

Conference Papers by Fabrizio Cariani

We develop a new semantics for the English auxiliary will that exploits a Stalnaker-style, singl... more We develop a new semantics for the English auxiliary will that exploits a Stalnaker-style, single-world selection function. Unlike existing theories, the resulting analysis succeeds in satisfying three desiderata: it accounts for the modal character of will, it predicts its peculiar lack of scope interactions, and it vindicates intuitive judgments about the probabilities of will-claims.

Drafts by Fabrizio Cariani

The principles of Conditional Excluded Middle (CEM) and Simplification of Disjunctive Antecedents... more The principles of Conditional Excluded Middle (CEM) and Simplification of Disjunctive Antecedents (SDA) have received substantial attention in isolation. Both principles are plausible generalizations about natural language conditionals. There is however little discussion of their interaction. This paper aims to remedy this gap and explore the significance of having both principles constrain the logic of the conditional. Our negative finding is that, together with elementary logical assumptions, CEM and SDA yield a variety of implausible consequences. Despite these incompatibility results, we open up a narrow space to satisfy both. We show that, by simultaneously appealing to the alternative-introducing analysis of disjunction and to the theory of homogeneity presuppositions, we can satisfy both. Furthermore, the theory that validates both principles resembles a recent semantics that is defended by Santorio on independent grounds. The cost of this approach is that it must give up the transitivity of entailment: we suggest that this is a feature, not a bug, and connect it with with recent developments of intransitive notions of entailment.

We present and discuss a series of experiments designed to test one of the most promising pragmat... more We present and discuss a series of experiments designed to test one of the most promising pragmatic accounts of conditional perfection—the phenomenon according to which conditionals can sometimes be strengthened to biconditionals. We test the idea that conditional perfection is a form of exhaustification triggered by the kind of question that the conditional is used to answer. We uncover evidence that conditional perfection is a form of exhaustification, but not that it is triggered by a relationship to a salient question. [Word Count (including everything but the abstract): 9830 words]

Synthese, 2008