It has sometimes been proposed that generic sentences make statements about prototypic members of a category. In this paper I will elaborate this view and develop an account where generic sentences express quantification about the normal exemplars in a categoryhere and in counterf.actual worlds sufficiendy similar to our own. Comparing the account to the currendy most widespread analysis which ...

Only knowing captures the intuitive notion that the beliefs of an agent are precisely those that follow from its knowledge base. While only knowing has a simple possible-world semantics in a single agent setting, the many agent case has turned out to be much more challenging. In a recent paper, we proposed an account which arguably extends only knowing to multiple agents in a natural way. Howev...

A foundational approach to modell ing belief contraction and revision is presented, based on a notion of similarity between belief sets. In contracting from a belief set, the result is the belief set(s) most similar to the original in which is not believed; similar considerations apply to belief revision. The modell ing of belief change generalises the Grove modell ing based on a system of sphe...

Though forecasting methods are used in numerous fields, we have seen no work on providing a general theoretical framework to build forecast operators into temporal databases. In this paper, we first develop a formal definition of a forecast operator as a function that satisfies a suite of forecast axioms. Based on this definition, we propose three families of forecast operators called determini...

Computer games are usually studied on the basis of a sensory-motor model related to classical cinema, a model which is almost exclusively oriented towards the actuality and causality of action. This assumption of an actiondriven, Aristotelean dramaturgy does not only concern the possible world which is represented in the game, but also the playing of the game itself. We argue that such an appro...

___________________________________________ In “Why is There Anything at All?” Peter van Inwagen argues that even though it was never necessary that concrete beings existed, it was always maximally probable – just short of necessity – that they did (van Inwagen, 1996). I argue that van Inwagen’s argument fails, albeit for an interesting reason which has remained so far unnoticed in the literatu...

This paper motivates and explores an expressivist theory of vagueness, modeled on Allan Gibbard’s (2003) normative expressivism. It shows how Chris Kennedy’s (2007) semantics for gradable adjectives can be adjusted to fit into a theory on Gibbardian lines, where assertions constrain not just possible worlds but plans for action. Vagueness, on this account, is literally indecision about where to...

This paper presents the first compositional semantics for if then conditionals. The semantics of each element are first examined separately. The meaning of if is modeled according to a possible worlds semantics. The particle then is analyzed as an anaphoric word that places its focused element inside the context settled by a previous element. Their meanings are subsequently combined in order to...

In this article I examine the constraints that skeptical hypotheses must satisfy in order to be used to raise significant skeptical challenges. I argue that skeptical hypotheses do not have to be logically, metaphysically or epistemically possible. They only need to depict scenarios that are subjectively indistinguishable from the actual world and must provide some indication of how subjects ca...

This paper is the first attempt to deal with aspects of the semantics of adverbs within a modern type theoretical setting. A number of issues pertaining to the semantics of different classes of adverbs like verididality and intensionality will be discussed and further shown to be captured straightforwardly within a modern type theoretical setting. In particular, I look at the issue of veridical...