{"id":1424,"date":"2022-03-20T13:44:58","date_gmt":"2022-03-20T13:44:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cful.letras.ulisboa.pt\/lancog\/seminar-series-in-analytic-philosophy-2021-22-session-21\/"},"modified":"2022-03-20T13:44:58","modified_gmt":"2022-03-20T13:44:58","slug":"seminar-series-in-analytic-philosophy-2021-22-session-21","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cful.letras.ulisboa.pt\/lancog\/seminar-series-in-analytic-philosophy-2021-22-session-21\/","title":{"rendered":"Seminar Series in Analytic Philosophy 2021-22, Session 21"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Modals and Copulas in Aristotle<\/strong><br \/>\nSimona Aimar (UCL)<\/p>\n<p>25 March 2022, 16:00 (Lisbon Time \u2013 GMT) | Sala Mattos Rom\u00e3o (Departamento de Filosofia)<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Abstract:<\/strong> The following sentences<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">(1) The Queen is necessarily British.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">(2) The Queen is possibly Italian.<\/p>\n<p>are <em>modal claims<\/em>. They contain <em>modals<\/em>, words that make a sentence express modalities like possibilities and necessities. Claim (1) contains the modal adverb \u2018necessarily\u2019 \u2013 a <em>necessity modal.<\/em> Claim (2) contains the modal \u2018possibly\u2019 \u2013 a <em>possibility modal<\/em>. This talk asks: How does Aristotle account for modals?<br \/>\nSo far, scholars assume that my question is a non-starter. In their view, Aristotle does <em>not<\/em> account for modals: no such account is present within his reconstruction of modal logic (in the <em>Prior Analytics<\/em>), or in his account of language (in <em>De Interpretatione<\/em>). Even the claim that Aristotle has a systematic semantics for natural language is regarded as suspicious.<br \/>\nMy talk debunks the suspicion that Aristotle was no semanticist. I reconstruct his theory of modals and show that it stems from a systematic account of language. Just like many contemporary linguists, Aristotle assumes that language is compositional and assertive claims have truth-conditions. Unlike contemporary authors, however, he analyses predications of the form \u2018a is F\u2019 as have a tripartite structure: a copula (\u2018is\u2019) takes scope over two terms (\u2018a\u2019 and \u2018F\u2019). Given this picture, he argues that modals are copula-modifiers, where his modifiers can be modelled as expressing a function that takes an item of a given linguistic type and issues a different item of the same linguistic type. Specifically, modals take a (non-modal) copula as an input and yield a modal copula as their output. I reconstruct his argument for the claim that modals are non-copula modifiers and how it relies on semantic intuitions about negations (a technique also used in contemporary linguistics). Finally, I show how Aristotle\u2019s account guarantees the insight that modals and quantifiers work in a parallel way and accounts for differences in scope. I conclude by raising the question of why (for all we know) Aristotle did not think about higher-order modal claims. Is there room for these in his semantics at all?.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>The room has a limited number of seats. Pre-registration is required at &lt;info@lancog.com&gt; until a day before the event. Note that this is an in-person event and everyone should wear a mask.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Modals and Copulas in Aristotle Simona Aimar (UCL) 25 March 2022, 16:00 (Lisbon Time \u2013 GMT) | Sala Mattos Rom\u00e3o (Departamento de Filosofia) &nbsp; Abstract: The following sentences (1) The Queen is necessarily British. (2) The Queen is possibly Italian. are modal claims. They contain modals, words that make a sentence express modalities like possibilities [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cful.letras.ulisboa.pt\/lancog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cful.letras.ulisboa.pt\/lancog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cful.letras.ulisboa.pt\/lancog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cful.letras.ulisboa.pt\/lancog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cful.letras.ulisboa.pt\/lancog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cful.letras.ulisboa.pt\/lancog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cful.letras.ulisboa.pt\/lancog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cful.letras.ulisboa.pt\/lancog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cful.letras.ulisboa.pt\/lancog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}