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A Counterexample to Modus Tollens

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  • Published: 06 June 2012
  • Volume 41, pages 1001–1024 (2012)
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A Counterexample to Modus Tollens
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  • Seth Yalcin1 
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Abstract

This paper defends a counterexample to Modus Tollens, and uses it to draw some conclusions about the logic and semantics of indicative conditionals and probability operators in natural language. Along the way we investigate some of the interactions of these expressions with knows, and we call into question the thesis that all knowledge ascriptions have truth-conditions. A probabilistic dynamic semantics for probability operators, conditionals, and acceptance attitudes is developed around the idea of representing the common ground of a conversation as a set of probability spaces.

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  1. University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Seth Yalcin

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  1. Seth Yalcin
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Correspondence to Seth Yalcin.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Yalcin, S. A Counterexample to Modus Tollens. J Philos Logic 41, 1001–1024 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10992-012-9228-4

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  • Received: 14 September 2011

  • Accepted: 14 January 2012

  • Published: 06 June 2012

  • Issue date: December 2012

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10992-012-9228-4

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Keywords

  • Conditionals
  • Probability operators
  • Epistemic modals
  • Probability
  • Dynamic semantics
  • Context
  • Common ground
  • Modus Ponens
  • Modus Tollens

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