Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Double World Indexing

08 April 2015  |  15:00  |  Seminari de Filosofia UB

Abstract

My talk will be focused on the expressive power of double-indexed modal languages. Languages of this kind employ intensional operators that draw a distinction between worlds/times of utterance and world/times of evaluation. According to an influential line of thought, such languages cannot express the truth-conditions of a wide class of English sentences. In order for them to capture the full expressive power of English –the argument goes–, it is necessary to abandon double indexing in favor of multiple indexing. In previous work, I have defended double temporal indexing from this objection. In this talk I will argue that the objection is also inconclusive as an argument against double world indexing. Appearances notwithstanding, the English sentences that allegedly motivate the postulation of more than two worlds in the semantics can be accounted for in a double-world-index framework.