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Counterfactual Conditionals
Counterfactual conditionals (also ''subjunctive'' or ''X-marked'') are conditional sentences which discuss what would have been true under different circumstances, e.g. "If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here." Counterfactuals are contrasted with indicatives, which are generally restricted to discussing open possibilities. Counterfactuals are characterized grammatically by their use of fake tense morphology, which some languages use in combination with other kinds of morphology including aspect and mood. Counterfactuals are one of the most studied phenomena in philosophical logic, formal semantics, and philosophy of language. They were first discussed as a problem for the material conditional analysis of conditionals, which treats them all as trivially true. Starting in the 1960s, philosophers and linguists developed the now-classic possible world approach, in which a counterfactual's truth hinges on its consequent holding at certain possible worlds where ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conditional Sentence
Conditional sentences are natural language sentences that express that one thing is contingent on something else, e.g. "If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled." They are so called because the impact of the main clause of the sentence is ''conditional'' on the dependent clause. A full conditional thus contains two clauses: a dependent clause called the ''antecedent'' (or ''protasis'' or ''if-clause''), which expresses the condition, and a main clause called the ''consequent'' (or ''apodosis'' or ''then-clause'') expressing the result. Languages use a variety of grammatical forms and constructions in conditional sentences. The forms of verbs used in the antecedent and consequent are often subject to particular rules as regards their tense, aspect, and mood. Many languages have a specialized type of verb form called the conditional mood – broadly equivalent in meaning to the English "would (do something)" – for use in some types of conditional sentences. Types of conditio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modal Verb
A modal verb is a type of verb that contextually indicates a modality such as a ''likelihood'', ''ability'', ''permission'', ''request'', ''capacity'', ''suggestion'', ''order'', ''obligation'', or ''advice''. Modal verbs generally accompany the base (infinitive) form of another verb having semantic content. In English, the modal verbs commonly used are ''can'', ''could'', ''may'', ''might'', ''shall'', ''should'', ''will'', ''would'', ''ought to'', ''used to'', ''dare'' and ''must.'' Function A modal auxiliary verb gives information about the function of the main verb that it governs. Modals have a wide variety of communicative functions, but these functions can generally be related to a scale ranging from possibility ("may") to necessity ("must"), in terms of one of the following types of modality: * epistemic modality, concerned with the theoretical ''possibility of propositions being true or not true'' (including likelihood and certainty) * deontic modality, concerned with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Intension
In any of several fields of study that treat the use of signs — for example, in linguistics, logic, mathematics, semantics, semiotics, and philosophy of language — an intension is any property or quality connoted by a word, phrase, or another symbol. In the case of a word, the word's definition often implies an intension. For instance, the intensions of the word ''plant'' include properties such as "being composed of cellulose", "alive", and "organism", among others. A ''comprehension'' is the collection of all such intensions. Overview The meaning of a word can be thought of as the bond between the ''idea the word means'' and the ''physical form of the word''. Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) contrasts three concepts: # the ''signifier'' – the "sound image" or the string of letters on a page that one recognizes as the form of a sign # the ''signified'' – the meaning, the concept or idea that a sign expresses or evokes # the ''referent'' – the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Lewis (philosopher)
David Kellogg Lewis (September 28, 1941 – October 14, 2001) was an American philosopher who is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton University from 1970 until his death. He is closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years. Lewis made significant contributions in philosophy of mind, philosophy of probability, epistemology, philosophical logic, aesthetics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of time and philosophy of science. In most of these fields he is considered among the most important figures of recent decades. But Lewis is most famous for his work in metaphysics, philosophy of language and semantics, in which his books ''On the Plurality of Worlds'' (1986) and ''Counterfactuals'' (1973) are considered classics. His works on the logic and semantics of counterfactual conditionals are broadly used by philosop ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Stalnaker
Robert Culp Stalnaker (born 1940) is an American philosopher who is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Education and career Stalnaker was born on January 22, 1940. He earned his BA from Wesleyan University, and his PhD from Princeton University in 1965. His thesis advisor was Stuart Hampshire, though he was strongly influenced by another faculty member, Carl Hempel. Stalnaker taught briefly at Yale University and the University of Illinois, and then for many years at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University before joining the MIT faculty in 1988. He retired from MIT in 2016. His many students include Jason Stanley, Zoltán Gendler Szábo, and Delia Graff Fara. In 2007, Stalnaker delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University on the topic of "Our Knowledge of the Internal World" ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Classical Logic
Classical logic (or standard logic or Frege-Russell logic) is the intensively studied and most widely used class of deductive logic. Classical logic has had much influence on analytic philosophy. Characteristics Each logical system in this class shares characteristic properties: Gabbay, Dov, (1994). 'Classical vs non-classical logic'. In D.M. Gabbay, C.J. Hogger, and J.A. Robinson, (Eds), ''Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming'', volume 2, chapter 2.6. Oxford University Press. # Law of excluded middle and double negation elimination # Law of noncontradiction, and the principle of explosion # Monotonicity of entailment and idempotency of entailment # Commutativity of conjunction # De Morgan duality: every logical operator is dual to another While not entailed by the preceding conditions, contemporary discussions of classical logic normally only include propositional and first-order logics. Shapiro, Stewart (2000). Classical Logic. In Stanford ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nelson Goodman
Henry Nelson Goodman (7 August 1906 – 25 November 1998) was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism, and aesthetics. Life and career Goodman was born in Somerville, Massachusetts, the son of Sarah Elizabeth (née Woodbury) and Henry Lewis Goodman. He was of Jewish origins. He graduated from Harvard University, AB, ''magna cum laude'' (1928). During the 1930s, he ran an art gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, while studying for a Harvard PhD in philosophy, which he completed in 1941. His experience as an art dealer helps explain his later turn towards aesthetics, where he became better known than in logic and analytic philosophy. During World War II, he served as a psychologist in the US Army. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania, 1946–1964, where his students included Noam Chomsky, Sydney Morgenbesser, Stephen Stich, and Hilary Putnam. He was a research fellow at the Harvard Center for Cogn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indo-Aryan Languages
The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Maldives. Moreover, apart from the Indian subcontinent, large immigrant and expatriate Indo-Aryan–speaking communities live in Northwestern Europe, Western Asia, North America, the Caribbean, Southeast Africa, Polynesia and Australia, along with several million speakers of Romani languages primarily concentrated in Southeastern Europe. There are over 200 known Indo-Aryan languages. Modern Indo-Aryan languages descend from Old Indo-Aryan languages such as early Vedic Sanskrit, through Middle Indo-Aryan languages (or Prakrits). The largest such languages in terms of first-speakers are Hindi–Urdu (),Standard Hindi first language: 260.3 million (2001), as second language: 120 million (199 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Swahili Grammar
Swahili is a Bantu language which is native to or mainly spoken in East African region. It has a grammatical structure that is typical for Bantu languages, bearing all the hallmarks of this language family. These include agglutinativity, a rich array of noun classes, extensive inflection for person (both subject and object), tense, aspect and mood, and generally a subject–verb–object word order. Typology Swahili may be described in several ways depending on the aspect being considered. * It is an agglutinative language. It constructs whole words by joining together discrete roots and morphemes with specific meanings, and may also modify words by similar processes. * Its basic word order is SVO. However, because the verb is inflected to indicate the subject and sometimes also the object, this order may be changed to emphasise certain parts of the sentence. * It has no grammatical case marking on the noun. Nominal roles are indicated by a combination of word order and agr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dutch Grammar
This article outlines the grammar of the Dutch language, which shares strong similarities with German grammar and also, to a lesser degree, with English grammar. Preliminary considerations Vowel length is indicated in Dutch spelling using a combination of double vowels and double consonants. Changes from single to double letters are common when discussing Dutch grammar, but they are entirely predictable once one knows how the spelling rules work. This means that the spelling alternations do not form part of the grammar, and they are not discussed here. For more information, see Dutch orthography. Word order Dutch word order is underlyingly SOV (subject–object–verb). There is an additional rule called V2 in main clauses, which moves the finite (inflected for subject) verb into the second position in the sentence. Because of this, sentences with only one verb appear with SVO (subject–verb–object) or VSO (verb–subject–object) order. : : However, any other verbs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Danish Grammar
Danish grammar is either the study of the grammar of the Danish language, or the grammatical system itself of the Danish language. Danish is often described as having ten word classes: verbs, nouns, pronouns, numerals, adjectives, adverbs, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. The grammar is mostly suffixing. This article focuses on Standard Danish. Nouns Inflections There are two grammatical genders in Danish: ''common'' and ''neuter''. All nouns are mostly arbitrarily divided into these two classes. The singular indefinite article (a/an in English) is ''en'' for common-gender nouns and ''et'' for neuter nouns. They are often informally called n-words and t-words. ''En dreng''. A boy. ''Et fængsel''. A jail. Unlike English, definite nouns in Danish are rendered by adding a suffix (i.e. not an article) to the indefinite form (unless qualified by an adjective; see below). The definite singular ending is ''-en'' for common-gender nouns and ''-et'' for neuter ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
