Organon F

Volume 26, August 2019, Issue 3, Pages 491–504

ISSN 2585-7150 (online) ISSN 1335-0668 (print)

Although possible worlds semantics is a powerful tool to represent the semantic properties of natural language sentences, it has been often argued that it is too coarse: with the tools that possible worlds semantics puts at our disposal, any relevant semantic difference has to be a truth conditional difference representable as a difference in intension. A case that raises questions about the ability of possible worlds semantics to make the appropriate discriminations is the distinction between rigidity and direct reference, an issue deeply connected to the representation of the behavior of two operators: ‘dthat’ and ‘actually’. Differences between the mode of operation of ‘dthat’ and ‘actually’ have been observed, but they have not been examined in depth. Our purpose is to explore systematically to what extent the observed differences between the two operators have truth conditional consequences that are formally representable in possible worlds semantics.

Actuality operator, direct reference, dthat, possible worlds semantics, rigidity.

Author

Genoveva Martí (Corresponding author)

Affiliation

ICREA and University of Barcelona

Address

ICREA, Passeig Lluís Companys 23, 08010 Barcelona, Spain, and Department of Philosophy, University of Barcelona, Montalegre 6, 08001 Barcelona, Spain

E-mail

gmarti@ub.edu 

Author

José Martínez-Fernández

Affiliation

University of Barcelona

Address

Department of Philosophy, University of Barcelona, Montalegre 6, 08001 Barcelona, Spain

E-mail

jose.martinez@ub.edu

Received

7 September 2018

Accepted

4 March 2019

Published online

24 August 2019

Publishers

Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences

Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences

APA

Martí, G. and Martínez-Fernández, J. (2019). On ‘actually’ and ‘dthat’: Truth-conditional Differences in Possible Worlds Semantics. Organon F, 26(3), 491–504. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2019.26308

Chicago

Martí, Genoveva and Martínez-Fernández, José. 2019. "On ‘actually’ and ‘dthat’: Truth-conditional Differences in Possible Worlds Semantics." Organon F 26 (3): 491–504. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2019.26308

Harvard

Martí, G. and Martínez-Fernández, J. (2019). On ‘actually’ and ‘dthat’: Truth-conditional Differences in Possible Worlds Semantics. Organon F, 26(3), pp. 491–504. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2019.26308

© Genoveva Martí, José Martínez-Fernández

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