When
Anthony S. Gillies
Sherwin Scott Professor of Philosophy
Director of Graduate Studies
University of Arizona
https://arizona.zoom.us/j/81900007951
Yo-yo conditionals and counterfactual supposition
Authors: Kai von Fintel (MIT) and (An)Thony Gillies (Arizona)
Abstract: There are two ways of articulating counterfactual thought experiments about what would have been the case if some (specific) things had been the case: counterfactual supposition and counterfactual conditionals. We introduce a novel puzzle about a class of iterated counterfactual thought experiments, the problem of yo-yo conditionals like *If it had rained then if it hadn’t rained the seats would be wet*, and show that it raises two problems for all extant theories of counterfactual conditionals. The *easy problem* of yo-yo conditionals is to predict their semantic and pragmatic markedness. The *hard problem* of yo-yo conditionals is to explain why they have those properties in the first place. There are plenty of possible solutions to the easy problem but seemingly (to us at any rate) none to the hard problem.