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Probability Modals and Infinite Domains

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Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of attempts to apply the mathematical theory of probability to the semantics of natural language probability talk. These sorts of “probabilistic” semantics are often motivated by their ability to explain intuitions about inferences involving “likely” and “probably”—intuitions that Angelika Kratzer’s canonical semantics fails to accommodate through a semantics based solely on an ordering of worlds and a qualitative ranking of propositions. However, recent work by Wesley Holliday and Thomas Icard has been widely thought to undercut this motivation: they present a world-ordering semantics that yields essentially the same logic as probabilistic semantics. In this paper, I argue that the challenge remains: defenders of world-ordering semantics have yet to offer a plausible semantics that captures the logic of comparative likelihood. Holliday & Icard’s semantics yields an adequate logic only if models are restricted to Noetherian pre-orders. But I argue that the Noetherian restriction faces problems in cases involving infinitely large domains of epistemic possibilities. As a result, probabilistic semantics remains the better explanation of the data.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful for helpful comments from Stephanie Allen, Adam Bjorndahl, Michael Caie, Fabrizio Cariani, Dmitri Gallow, Anil Gupta, Wesley Holliday, Harvey Lederman, James Shaw, Eric Swanson, and several anonymous referees.

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  1. Institute for Science, Technology, and Society, South China Normal University, Higher Education Mega Center, Guangzhou, China

    Adam Marushak

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Marushak, A. Probability Modals and Infinite Domains. J Philos Logic 49, 1041–1055 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10992-020-09547-8

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