Expressive power, mood, and actuality

In Wehmeier (J Philos Log 33:607–630, 2004) we are presented with the subjunctive modal language, a way of dealing with the expressive inadequacy of modal logic by marking atomic predicates as being either in the subjunctive or indicative mood. Wehmeier claims that this language is expressively equivalent to the standard actuality language, and that despite this the marked-unmarked dichotomies are not the same in the two languages. In this paper we will attend to Wehmeier’s argument that this is the case, and show that this conclusion rests on what might be considered an uncharitable stipulation concerning what it is for a formula in the actuality language to be true in a model.     

Lived religion meets secular life: the dynamics of framing and the subjunctive power of ritual

ABSTRACT

In spite of the variety of often welcome everyday enchantments and empowerment that lived religion may bring to an individual in his/her personal life, it may become problematic in a person’s social life due to provoking tensions with significant others who hold different worldviews. This controversy necessitates the adoption of tactics and practices for adjustment and regulation, should that individual wish to enhance the benefits of religious enchantment and, simultaneously, maintain his/her position in the shared social lifeworld. This article argues that ritual theory, particularly in combining the notions of ritual framing and the subjunctive mode of ritual, offers a promising approach to researching this dynamic. The ritual studies approach helps shed light on the sometimes quite subtle ways in which moving in and out of the ritual frame makes it possible to regulate the often delicate balance of enchantment and disenchantment. This article examines the case study of women engaging in angel spirituality in Finland and the way they are able to navigate different ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ worlds. It argues that the dynamic combination of ritual framing and the subjunctive mode of ritual works as important possibility work in everyday life in a society which is uneasy about very strong expressions of lived religion.     

Card pull in projective testing

Card pull, the tendency of the test stimuli to evoke or predispose certain cognitive and affective responses in the subject, is essential to the understanding and practice of projective testing. The basic instruction in projective testing employs the subjunctive mood to catalyze the dialectic between actuality and potentiality inherent in the projective stimulus. The subject is encouraged to play with the stimulus, to modify fact, to forsake the literal and the concrete, and to toy with the reality-stuff of the stimulus. Various conceptions of projective stimuli are reviewed and considered nondefinitive of projective testing. Projective testing is tentatively defined as a state of mind, a temporary but adaptive collusion shared between tester and subject which involves the former inviting the latter to modify a sample of reality.     

Subjunctive biscuit and stand-off conditionals

Conventional wisdom has it that many intriguing features of indicative conditionals aren’t shared by subjunctive conditionals. Subjunctive morphology is common in discussions of wishes and wants, however, and conditionals are commonly used in such discussions as well. As a result such discussions are a good place to look for subjunctive conditionals that exhibit features usually associated with indicatives alone. Here I offer subjunctive versions of J. L. Austin’s ‘biscuit’ conditionals—e.g., “There are biscuits on the sideboard if you want them”—and subjunctive versions of Allan Gibbard’s ‘stand-off’ or ‘Sly Pete’ conditionals, in which speakers with no relevant false beliefs can in the same context felicitously assert conditionals with the same antecedents and contradictory consequents. My cases undercut views according to which the indicative/subjunctive divide marks a great difference in the meaning of conditionals. They also make trouble for treatments of indicative conditionals that cannot readily be generalized to subjunctives.     

Dispositions and subjunctives

It is generally agreed that dispositions cannot be analyzed in terms of simple subjunctive conditionals (because of what are called “masked dispositions” and “finkish dispositions”). I here defend a qualified subjunctive account of dispositions according to which an object is disposed to Φ when conditions C obtain if and only if, if conditions C were to obtain, then the object would Φ ceteris paribus. I argue that this account does not fall prey to the objections that have been raised in the literature.     

Conditionals and Actuality

It is known that indicative and subjunctive conditionals interact differently with a rigidifying “actually” operator. The paper studies this difference in an abstract setting. It does not assume the framework of possible world semantics, characterizing “actually” instead by the type of logically valid formulas to which it gives rise. It is proved that in a language with such features all sentential contexts that are congruential (in the sense that they preserve logical equivalence) are extensional (in the sense that they preserve material equivalence). For a subjunctive conditional, the natural conclusion to draw is that it is non-congruential. It is much harder to defend the claim that an indicative conditional is non-congruential. The pressure to treat the indicative conditional as truth-functional is correspondingly greater. The implications of these results for attempts to interpret the indicative conditional as an epistemic or doxastic operator are assessed.

---

Reasoning with deontic and counterfactual conditionals

We report two new phenomena of deontic reasoning: (1) For conditionals with deontic content such as, “If the nurse cleaned up the blood then she must have worn rubber gloves”, reasoners make more modus tollens inferences (from “she did not wear rubber gloves” to “she did not clean up the blood”) compared to conditionals with epistemic content. (2) For conditionals in the subjunctive mood with deontic content, such as, “If the nurse had cleaned up the blood then she must have had to wear rubber gloves”, reasoners make the same frequency of all inferences as they do for conditionals in the indicative mood with deontic content. In this regard, subjunctive deontics are different from subjunctive epistemic conditionals: reasoners interpret subjunctive epistemic conditionals as counterfactual and they make more negative inferences such as modus tollens from them. The experiments show these two phenomena occur for deontic conditionals that contain the modal auxiliary “must” and ones that do not. We discuss the results in terms of the mental representations of deontic conditionals and of counterfactual conditionals.     

Conditional Excluded Middle

In this essay I renew the case for Conditional Excluded Middle (CXM) in light of recent developments in the semantics of the subjunctive conditional. I argue that Michael Tooley’s recent backward causation counterexample to the Stalnaker-Lewis comparative world similarity semantics undermines the strongest argument against CXM, and I offer a new, principled argument for the validity of CXM that is in no way undermined by Tooley’s counterexample. Finally, I formulate a simple semantics for the subjunctive conditional that is consistent with both CXM and Tooley’s counterexample.

---

Remarks on counterpossibles

Since the publication of David Lewis’ Counterfactuals, the standard line on subjunctive conditionals with impossible antecedents (or counterpossibles) has been that they are vacuously true. That is, a conditional of the form ‘If p were the case, q would be the case’ is trivially true whenever the antecedent, p, is impossible. The primary justification is that Lewis’ semantics best approximates the English subjunctive conditional, and that a vacuous treatment of counterpossibles is a consequence of that very elegant theory. Another justification derives from the classical lore than if an impossibility were true, then anything goes. In this paper we defend non-vacuism, the view that counterpossibles are sometimes non-vacuously true and sometimes non-vacuously false. We do so while retaining a Lewisian semantics, which is to say, the approach we favor does not require us to abandon classical logic or a similarity semantics. It does however require us to countenance impossible worlds. An impossible worlds treatment of counterpossibles is suggested (but not defended) by Lewis (Counterfactuals. Blackwell, Oxford, 1973), and developed by Nolan (Notre Dame J Formal Logic 38:325–527, 1997), Kment (Mind 115:261–310, 2006a: Philos Perspect 20:237–302, 2006b), and Vander Laan (In: Jackson F, Priest G (eds) Lewisian themes. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004). We follow this tradition, and develop an account of comparative similarity for impossible worlds.     

Back to the actual future

The purpose of the paper is to rethink the role of actuality in the branching model of possibilities. We investigate the idea that the model should be enriched with an additional factor—the so-called Thin Red Line—which is supposed to represent the single possible course of events that gets actualized in time. We believe that this idea was often misconceived which prompted some unfortunate reactions. On the one hand, it suggested problematic semantic models of future tense and and on the other, it provoked questionable lines of criticism. We reassess the debate and point to potential pitfalls, focusing on the semantic dimension of the Thin Red Line theory. Our agenda transcends the semantics, however. We conclude that semantic considerations do not threaten the Thin Red Line theory and that the proper debate should be carried in the domain of metaphysics.

     

Counterfactuals for Consequentialists

That all subjunctive conditionals with true antecedents and trueconsequents are themselves also true is implied by every plausibleand popularly endorsed account. But I am wary of endorsing thisimplication. I argue that all presently endorsed accounts fail tocapture the nature of certain subjunctive conditionals in contextsof consequentialist reasoning. I attempt to show that we must allowfor the possibility that some subjunctive conditionals with trueantecedents and true consequents are false, if we are to believethat certain types of straightforward consequentialist reasoningare coherent. I begin by evaluating a pair of morally releventcounterfactuals in a case via David Lewis's account. I then turnto a slight modification of the case, arguing that Lewis'ssemantics fails to generate the correct truth values of thesubjunctive conditionals in the modified case. Finally, I presenta modified version of Lewis's semantics that generates the correctresults in all of the cases.     

Where No Mind Has Gone Before: Exploring Laws in Distant and Lonely Worlds

Do the laws of nature supervene on ordinary, non‐nomic matters of fact? Lange’s criticism of Humean supervenience (HS) plays a key role in his account of natural laws. Though we are sympathetic to his account, we remain unconvinced by his criticism. We focus on his thought experiment involving a world containing nothing but a lone proton and argue that it does not cast sufficient doubt on HS. In addition, we express some concern about locating the lawmakers in an ontology of primitive subjunctive facts and suggest that a ‘mixed’ metaphysics to the lawmaker question might be attractive.     

二维语义“合法”吗？

据查尔默斯（David Chalmers）的二维语义理论,每个表达式被划分出两方面的内涵：认知内涵和虚拟内涵,划分的合法性在哪里？马可尼（Diego Marconi）对此提出了质疑,他认为,认知内涵和虚拟内涵是不可以被截然划分开的独立的两种语义特征,而且它们之间的模棱两可性也不可以借助另一种语言进行消除。因此,查尔默斯把一个表达式的意义拆分成两部分的做法是不合法的。笔者认为,如果把二维进行语义层面和原语义层面的理解,那么对语义进行二维划分的做法还是可取的。     

Veiled Reality and Structural Realism

Abstract

The noted philosopher of science, Bernard d'Espagnat, tries to mediate between objective reality and empirical reality via the notion of veiled reality: namely, while the laws proper to things in themselves are unknown, their existence and interrelated activity can be inferred from observation and analysis of human experience. The author claims that Whiteheadian creativity offers a better candidate for the notion of veiled reality because it is a transcendent activity, not a transcendent actuality. Likewise, a revision of the Whiteheadian category of society as a structured field of activity for its constituent actual entities indirectly confirms Henri Poincaré's notion of structural realism.     

Elusive narrators in literature and film

Subjunctivitis is the doctrine that what is distinctive about knowledge is essential modal in character, and thus is captured by certain subjunctive conditionals. One principal formulation of subjunctivism invokes a ``sensitivity condition' (Nozick, De Rose), the other invokes a ``safety condition' (Sosa). It is shown in detail how defects in the sensitivity condition generate unwanted results, and that the virtues of that condition are merely apparent. The safety condition is untenable also, because it is too easily satisfied. A powerful motivation for adopting subjunctivism would be that it provides a solution to the problem of misleading evidence, but in fact, it does not.     

Subjunctive Conditional Probability

There seem to be two ways of supposing a proposition: supposing “indicatively” that Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet, it is likely that someone else did; supposing “subjunctively” that Shakespeare hadn’t written Hamlet, it is likely that nobody would have written the play. Let P(B//A) be the probability of B on the subjunctive supposition that A. Is P(B//A) equal to the probability of the corresponding counterfactual, A □→B? I review recent triviality arguments against this hypothesis and argue that they do not succeed. On the other hand, I argue that even if we can equate P(B//A) with P(A □→B), we still need an account of how subjunctive conditional probabilities are related to unconditional probabilities. The triviality arguments reveal that the connection is not as straightforward as one might have hoped.     

Endless Future: A Persistent Thorn in the Kalām Cosmological Argument

Abstract

Wes Morriston contends that William Lane Craig's argument for the impossibility of a beginningless past results in an equally good argument for the impossibility of an endless future (or at least a pre-determined one). Craig disagrees. I show that Craig's reply reveals a commitment to an unmotivated position concerning the relationship between actuality and the actual infinite. I then assess alternative routes to the impossibility of a beginningless past that have been offered in the literature, and show that, contrary to initial appearances, these routes similarly seem to support the impossibility of an endless future.     

The relation between personal & archetypal factors in psychological development

Abstract

Edward Edinger is a prominent Jungian analyst whose book, Ego and Archetype, is widely regarded as a modern classic in analytical psychology. The roots of this book go back to the early years of his career when he began his exploration of the fundamental relations between the personal and trans-personal aspects of psychological life.

This paper is a newly edited version of a lecture Dr. Edinger gave in 1962 to Jungian analysts in New York and Los Angeles. of particular interest to the general reader is the way he illuminates how Jung and his followers utilize dreams and the personal relationship between therapist and patient to facilitate psychological development within the “archetypal field which they share jointly.” In addition, k illustrates how the principle of complementarity in physics and psychology, as discussed by Bell, Bohr, and Jung in this issue, facilitates a democratic approach to psychotherapy. Does this seem to be an unlikely brew of physical, psychological, and political concepts? Read on!     

Inferences from semifactual 'even if' conditionals

We report three experiments on semifactual conditionals such as 'even if he had worn his seatbelt he would have been injured'. Semifactuals contain a counterfactual antecedent (the presupposed fact is, he did not wear a seatbelt) and a true consequent (the fact is, he was injured). The experiments show that from the denial of the antecedent, 'he did not wear his seatbelt', reasoners do not infer the standard conclusion 'he was not injured' but instead they infer the asymmetric conclusion, 'he was injured'. From the affirmation of the consequent, 'he was injured', they do not infer the standard conclusion 'he wore his seatbelt' but instead they infer that there is no valid conclusion. The first experiment shows this pattern for 'even if' subjunctive conditionals compared to 'if' indicative conditionals, the second extends it to 'even if' subjunctive conditionals compared to 'even though' indicative concessives, and the third extends it to 'if...also/still' subjunctive conditionals. The results suggest that people think about two possibilities to understand a semifactual: the conjecture, he wore his seatbelt and he was injured, and the presupposed facts, he did not wear his seatbelt and he was injured.     

Ceteris Paribus Conditionals and Comparative Normalcy

Our understanding of subjunctive conditionals has been greatly enhanced through the use of possible world semantics and, more precisely, by the idea that they involve variably strict quantification over possible worlds. I propose to extend this treatment to ceteris paribus conditionals – that is, conditionals that incorporate a ceteris paribus or ‘other things being equal’ clause. Although such conditionals are commonly invoked in scientific theorising, they traditionally arouse suspicion and apprehensiveness amongst philosophers. By treating ceteris paribus conditionals as a species of variably strict conditional I hope to shed new light upon their content and their logic.