Meaning Meeting - Fabrizio Cariani / Anankastic conditionals and the reason-based analysis of deontic modals
Meaning Meeting - Fabrizio Cariani / Anankastic conditionals and the reason-based analysis of deontic modals
Tuesday April 23, Fabrizio presents his work on anankastic conditionals and deontic modals at the Meaning Meeting, simplified and refocussed since his last presentation on the topic.
Anankastic conditionals are conditionals of the form: "If you want A, you have to do B". They present a problem for all compositional analyses of conditionals and modals. After explaining the problem, I identify and develop a solution to the puzzle of anankastic conditionals that is novel in the sense that it has gone largely unnoticed, but also well-worn in that the materials for it have long been available. The solution involves an integration of the premise semantics (very vaguely in the Kratzer vein) and a default theory of reasons (such as the one presented in Horty, 2012, leveraging several decades of research on default logic). To stress-test the proposal I investigate how it might be applied to the variety of anankastic-adjacent data discussed by Condoravdi and Lauer (2016). The resulting approach is not just an exceptional fit for the problem of anankastic conditionals, but also an independently promising account of deontic modals.