Counterfactual attitudes and multi-centered worlds

By Dilip Ninan. 2012

88 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Counterfactual attitudes like imagining, dreaming, and wishing create a problem for the standard formal semantic theory of de re attitude ascriptions. I show how the problem can be avoided if we represent an agent's attitudinal possibilities using "multi-centered worlds", possible worlds with multiple distinguished individuals, each of which represents an individual with whom the agent is acquainted. I then present a compositional semantics for de re ascriptions according to which singular terms are "assignment-sensitive" expressions and attitude verbs are "assignment shifters". http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.5 BibTeX info

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Theory and Mathematics, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/028a2a5929c2c9949b82fbe04f9cd75fc3bcac76