I do not know how tall you are; I doubt that you starved as a child. My empirical evidence tells strongly against (1), by indicating that childhood malnutrition tends to reduce adult height. In contrast, (2) is logically trivial. How things actually are includes your actual height, whether or not it also includes your childhood starvation; how things would have been if you had starved as a chil...

The logic of conditionals (and, especially, of subjunctive or counterfactual conditionals) is a long-standing problem for the theory of common sense reasoning and philosophical logic. In this paper, I explore commonalities between the logical accounts of the conditional involving “closeness” relations over possible worlds and work in the logic of action and change that attempts to characterize ...

The main claim of this paper is that a general theory of what has been called ‘‘expletive’’ negation in subordinate clauses should allow for the possibility of it occurring without being licensed by negative predicates, and more crucially that, contrary to the traditional term ‘‘expletive’’, this type of negation is not semantically void. Thus I propose to term this type of negation Evaluative ...

We extend the notion of \only knowing" introduced by Halpern and Moses 11] to many agents and to a number of modal logics. In this approach, \all an agent knows is " is true in a structure M if, in M, the agent knows and has a maximum set of \possibilities". To extend this approach, we need to make precise what counts as a \possibility". In the single-agent case, we can identify a possibility w...

Can a digital computer ever pass the Turing Test? In this paper, we argue that the metaphysical possibility of such a program is not the only concern. Even if we assume a generous variant of the Church-Turing thesis, practical concerns dominate two of today’s most promising approaches: human brain simulation and large-scale cognitive algorithms. We report on recent trends in the field of high-p...

Among the many grammatical features which are shared between Hiw and Lo-Toga – the two Oceanic languages spoken in the Torres Islands of Vanuatu – are the semantics of Tense-AspectMood markers, and their effects on the syntax of clause dependency. Even though these two languages possess a wealth of subordinators such as conjunctions or relativizers, two TAM markers show a clear propensity, in f...