Formal Semantics and Philosophical Logic

Roberto Ciuni: Plausibility Trees and Simple Future


Speaker: Roberto Ciuni
Title: Plausibility Trees and Simple Future
Date:
Time: 14:30 - 16:00
Location: Science Park 107, room F1.15

 

Abstract. In this talk I introduce a new formal setting for simple-future sentences in branching time. The new setting combines a quantification over histories–which is available in all branching-time logics–together with a plausibility relation between histories, so that a sentence like (a) ‘There will be a sea battle’ is taken to mean ‘There is a history h such that for all the histories h’ that are equally or more plausible than h, there is a later moment where it is the case that there is a sea battle’ (the implicit condition here is that we consider histories passing through the moment of valuation.) I present the new semantics against the background of current branching-time semantics, and I show that the new setting can help overcome some conceptual problems current branching-time semantics have in modelling ‘future contingents’ – that is simple-future sentences about states of affairs that are neither impossible nor inevitable.