Kai von Fintel » Publications

Update: Must … Stay … Strong!

kvf — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:22:16 +0000

Thony and I are thrilled that our article “Must … Stay … Strong!” is to appear in Natural Language Semantics. The article is in production and a DOI has already been assigned but is not functional yet, DOI:10.1007/s11050-010-9058-2.

The latest version is now available as a pre-print:

von Fintel, Kai & Anthony S. Gillies. 2010. Must … stay … strong! URL http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-gillies-2010-mss.pdf. Final pre-print, to appear in Natural Language Semantics.

We are grateful to NLS‘s reviewers and many colleagues who have given us useful feedback over the years (!) that we have been crafting this article.

Since the article is appearing in a Springer journal, we had to sign away our copyright. But MIT has negotiated fairly good terms with Springer that make their policies more or less compatible with our Open Access Policy. We are allowed to make the final pre-print openly accessible, including through MIT’s DSpace archive (where it will appear once the publisher’s version is out on the streets).

Draft article on conditionals

kvf — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:55:44 +0000

I have a draft of my article on conditionals for the new semantics handbook edited by Klaus von Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn, and Paul Portner. As you’ll see, I have kept the article at a fairly non-technical level while trying not to distort the results in the literature. There are plenty of references to the advanced research literature so that people can get the full and technical story if they wish. [My pipedream -- and the expectation of certain editor friends of mine -- is that I will teach both the informal stories told in this article and the technical implementations and arguments in a book on conditionals that I will be writing any time now.]

There is still time for edits (although the word limit has been reached so new material would have to go in through some exchange with material to be deleted), so I would really appreciate any comments that people might have. But time is of the essence, since the handbook is supposed to go to press very soon.

CIA Leaks is in Top Ten in 2008

kvf — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 10:00:00 +0000

Thony and I were very happy to learn that The Philosopher’s Annual has declared “CIA Leaks” to be one of the ten best philosophy articles in 2008.

New version of “Must … Stay … Strong!”

kvf — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 21:52:49 +0000

Thony Gillies and I have put the finishing touches on a new version of our paper on the alleged weakness of epistemic must:

von Fintel, Kai & Anthony S. Gillies. 2009. Must … stay … strong! URL http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-gillies-2009-mss.pdf. Ms, MIT and Rutgers University, submitted to Natural Language Semantics.

Mea Culpa

kvf — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:32:21 +0000

As I mentioned, my article on presupposition accommodation appeared recently in Philosophical Perspectives, the annual supplement to Noûs. The article is in good company, as you’ll see when you look at the Table of Contents. Nevertheless, I should not have published the paper there.

The problem is that I signed a publication agreement (imposed by Blackwell, or rather their overlords, Wiley) that gives me the right to share the preprint of the article with colleagues except that I can’t put it online until 24 (!) months after publication:

That’s really unacceptable and I should not have accepted it. So, here’s my public pledge: I will not publish under any agreement in the future that doesn’t allow me to share (at least) the preprint freely online.

Unfortunately, since I’m the editor of the open-access journal Semantics and Pragmatics, I can’t go to the ideal situation myself yet (until someone starts an open-access competitor to our journal). But you can! Please submit your best work to open access journals so that we can get rid of these kinds of impediments to free scientific communication.

Accommodation, Again

kvf — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:58:21 +0000

My paper on presupposition accommodation has now appeared:

von Fintel, Kai. 2008. What is presupposition accommodation, again? Philosophical Perspectives 22(1): 137–170. doi:10.1111/j.1520-8583.2008.00144.x.

If you don’t have institutional access to the journal, send me email and I will send you a copy of the article. [More soon on my misguided decision to publish this paper in this journal.]

Update: I recommend a short note by Stalnaker, which just appeared in Linguistics and Philosophy:

Stalnaker, Robert. 2009. A response to Abbott on presupposition and common ground. Linguistics and Philosophy. doi:10.1007/s10988-008-9047-9.

Universals Article Has Appeared

kvf — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:48:39 +0000

von Fintel, Kai & Lisa Matthewson. 2008. Universals in semantics. The Linguistic Review 25(1-2): 139–201. doi:10.1515/TLIR.2008.004.

The State of the Epistemic Trilogy

kvf — Thu, 22 May 2008 03:09:06 +0000

Thony Gillies and I are wrapping up the work on our trilogy on epistemic modality. Two of the articles have now appeared, one will appear later this year, and the last is about to be submitted.[*] Here is the line-up:

Kai von Fintel & Anthony S. Gillies. 2007. “An Opinionated Guide to Epistemic Modality”. In Oxford Studies in Epistemology: Volume 2, edited by Tamar Szabó Gendler & John Hawthorne, pp. 32-62. Oxford University Press.
Kai von Fintel & Anthony S. Gillies. 2008. “CIA Leaks”. The Philosophical Review, 117(1): 77–98. doi:10.1215/00318108-2007-025.
Kai von Fintel & Anthony S. Gillies. 2008. “Might Made Right”. To appear in a volume on epistemic modality, edited by Andy Egan and Brian Weatherson, Oxford University Press.
Kai von Fintel & Anthony S. Gillies. 2008. “Must … Stay … Strong!”. ms, MIT and University of Michigan.

For now, we’re going to leave it at that, although we have been approached about the idea of writing a book on the topic. This summer, we’re planning to turn to some puzzles about deontic conditionals (just as soon as we’re done being glued to the screen watching Euro 2008).

[*]: Yes, that’s four articles, so the trilogy is somewhat inaccurately named. But that is still not quite as inaccurate as Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy trilogy with its five books.

CIA Leaks, Appeared

kvf — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:48:10 +0000

“CIA Leaks”, the article Thony Gillies and I wrote about some problems for relativist analyses of epistemic modals, has now appeared in the Philosophical Review:

Kai von Fintel & Anthony S. Gillies. 2008. “CIA Leaks”. The Philosophical Review, 117(1): 77–98. doi:10.1215/00318108-2007-025.

“Must” … Stay … Strong!

kvf — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 20:12:19 +0000

With my frequent collaborator, Thony Gillies, I am working on the fourth article in our trilogy on epistemic modality. The previous installments are, of course:

The fourth one is called “Must … Stay … Strong!” and attacks the persistent myth or mantra that must p is a weaker claim that plain p. We have started taking the material on the road, but there’s plenty of work to be done. For now, there are an evolving slideshow for various presentations and a handout based on the slides. As always, we’d appreciate any comments, criticism, and feedback.

[Update (5/21/08): A full draft of the "Must ... Stay ... Strong!" paper is now available.]