euro is over and since i don’t want to mention anything about how spain’s midfield completely dominated germany’s, i’ll instead put up a shiny new paper. even though the paper is empirical, there are some philosophy-ish bits in it.

so here’s the skinny: i’ve been filling my days doing some work with mary on cooperation in behavioral game theory. we’ve been looking at a new way of segregating classes of social preference models, pinning commitments on them based on what information certain players have about the payoffs and about what the others know about that distribution of information. the facts are really stark, and bad news for some pretty famous people.

last week’s mini-workshop featured frank veltman. he was trying out his new paper on imperatives and permission. y’know, explaining stuff like Ross’s paradox:

eat your veggies! doesn’t entail eat your veggies or eat some ice cream!

and (performative) free-choice permission puzzles:

you may eat your veggies or some ice cream entails you may eat some ice cream

craige roberts was in town to give comments and a good time was had by all.

as part of my current nsf grant on the semantics and pragmatics of modals in natural language, i’m hosting a series of mini-workshops here in the deuce.

(the mini-workshops aren’t regular, they’re occasional. and there’s a regular reading group associated with them - hence, omg. all of that is so i can send emails with subject-lines like “omg: this week’s reading”.)

anyway, we had our first mini-workshop last week: kai von fintel presented a paper, “must … stay … strong!”, that we’ve been working on lately. this is the fourth paper in our trilogy on epistemic modals, and is affectionately known as “shatner” to us. in it we take aim at the mantra that must p is weaker than p and give a new account of the evidential feel that must has.

chris potts and craige roberts gave us comments and provided lots of good stuff for us to think about. (so it was an invasion but a fun one.)

we’re mid-revision on the paper right now but we’ll get a draft up asap.

not terribly exciting news. but i am sort of happy that i did the tweaking of both fonts and page layout on my (mostly up-to-date) cv. donald knuth is awesome.

the calendar says ‘07 (and the looming eastern apa confirms that), but the folks at Phil Review say no: it’s january 2008 and so as kai announced that means you can get your very own copy of our cia leaks paper at news stands now. or here. or even here.

my counterfactuals paper has finally appeared in l&p. i’m pretty stoked about that.

it’s odd, though, that it was published “online” in november but the issue is june 2007. But, wev, as the kids say.

one other thing: a few typesetting errors managed to sneak in after i corrected the proofs … nothing major, though. you wouldn’t have believed the corrections. seriously. makes me happy about s&p’s launch. those guys have some typesetting skillz. mad skillz.

I was off to Rutgers for the semantics workshop this past weekend. Brian drew the short straw and had to offer comments on, and hence had to slog through, this paper. The comments didn’t disappoint (true, that) and the workshop was lots of fun (double true).

If you’d rather see the advertisement for the paper rather than the paper itself, you can check out the beamer slides for the talk. (I left the pauses in so you can recreate the whole experience…really.)

If is a pretty cool little world. The biggest little word, really. It’d be super if the simplest story of it — taking if to be a strict conditional over a set of contextually determined possibilities — were right. So here are two (still drafty, beware!) papers that make a (modest) case for superness: Iffiness and On truth conditions for if (but not quite only if).

Both of these papers develop a strict conditional story in way that is faithful to the Ramsey test — well, at least the version of the Ramsey test I learned on the playground. That means that conditionals are both index-shifty (they shift the point of evaluation) and context-shifty (they shift the context relevant for that evaluation). So if is both strict and shifty (twice over).

Kai and I took our sweet time getting a semi-publicly-viewable draft of our paper ‘Might’ Made Right up. So, in the spirit of procrastination, I hereby announce said paper some 3 months after we posted it over at semanticsarchive.

The final pre-final version of “CIA Leaks” is up at semanticsarchive.