Open AccessCounterfactual donkeys don’t get high
Author(s) -
Michael Deigan
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
zas papers in linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1435-9588
DOI - 10.21248/zaspil.60.2018.472
Subject(s) - donkey , counterfactual thinking , counterfactual conditional , property (philosophy) , similarity (geometry) , computer science , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , mathematics , psychology , social psychology , geography , philosophy , epistemology , image (mathematics) , archaeology
I present data that suggest the universal entailments of counterfactual donkey sentencesaren’t as universal as some have claimed. I argue that this favors the strategy of attributingthese entailments to a special property of the similarity ordering on worlds provided bysome contexts, rather than to a semantically encoded sensitivity to assignment.Keywords: donkey sentences, counterfactuals, conditionals, similarity, simplification.