ON ‘ACTUALLY’ AND ‘DTHAT’: TRUTH-CONDITIONAL DIFFERENCES IN POSSIBLE WORLD SEMANTICS

• Authors: Martí Genoveva , Martínez-Fernández José
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Although possible world semantics is a powerful tool to represent the semantic properties of natural language sentences, it has been often argued that it is too coarse: with the tools that possible world semantics puts at our disposal, any relevant semantic difference has to be a truth conditional difference representable as a difference in intension. A case that raises questions about the ability of possible worlds semantics to make the appropriate discriminations is the distinction between rigidity and direct reference, an issue deeply connected to the representation of the behaviour of two operators: ‘dthat’ and ‘actually’. Differences between the mode of operation of ‘dthat’ and ‘actually’ have been observed, but they have not been examined in depth. Our purpose is to explore systematically to what extent the observed differences between the two operators have truth conditional consequences that are formally representable in possible world semantics.

Keywords

EN

ACTUALITY OPERATOR; DIRECT REFERENCE; WORLD SEMANTICS; RIGIDITY

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Institute of Philosophy of Academy of Sciences of Czech Republic
• Journal: Organon F. medzinárodný časopis pre analytickú filozofiu
• Year: 2019
• Volume: 26
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 491 – 504

Contributors

author

Martí Genoveva

• University of Barcelona (Department of Philosophy, Montalegre 6, 08001 Barcelona, Spain

author

Martínez-Fernández José

Identifiers

DOI

https: https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2019.26308