Alternatives in Counterfactuals: What Is Right and What Is Not

Abstract

Classical semantics for counterfactuals is based on a notion of minimal change: If A, would C says that the worlds that make A true and that are otherwise minimally di erent from the actual world are C-worlds. This semantics su ers from a well-known di culty with disjunctive antecedents (see e.g. Alonso-Ovalle 2009, Willer 2018, Santorio 2018, a.o.). In a recent study, Ciardelli, Zhang, and Champollion (2018b; henceforth, CZC) present new, related di culties for the classical approach having to do with unpredicted di erences between counterfactuals with De Morgan-equivalent antecedents, and related pattern of inferences. They propose a new semantics for counterfactuals, which builds on inquisitive semantics (see Ciardelli et al. 2018a) and gives up on minimal change. Building on this debate, we report on a series of experiments that investigate the role of overt negation in this data. Our results replicate CZC’s main e ects, but they also indicate that those e ects are linked to the presence of overt negation. We propose a novel account, based on three key assumptions: (i) the semantics for counterfactuals does involve a notion of minimal change, after all; (ii) the meanings of disjunction and negation are associated with alternatives, which interact with the meaning of counterfactuals; (iii) the alternatives generated by negation are partially determined by the question under discussion (QUD). We compare our account with other existing accounts, including CZC’s own proposal, as well as Schulz’s (2019) and Bar-Lev & Fox’s (2020) ones. ∗ We would like to thank Maria Aloni, Moysh Bar-Lev, Fabrizio Cariani, Ivano Ciardelli, Lucas Champollion, Julie Gerard, Matthew Mandelkern, Paul Marty, and Yasu Sudo for very helpful discussion, and audiences at NELS 50 at MIT, the Amsterdam Colloquium 2019, Ulster University, University of Maryland, University of California San Diego, University of Chicago, and UCL. Work on this project was partially supported by the Leverhulme trust grant RPG-2018-425 to Jacopo Romoli. The authors equally contributed to the project and are listed in alphabetical order.