A pre-semantics for counterfactual conditionals and similar logics
This work addresses a foundational issue in logic and cognitive science by offering an alternative to the Stalnaker/Lewis semantics, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of providing a more realistic semantics for counterfactual conditionals by proposing a pre-semantics based on neuroscience findings, which describes brain structures rather than world models, and concludes that there are no atomic pictures.
The elegant Stalnaker/Lewis semantics for counterfactual conditonals works with distances between models. But human beings certainly have no tables of models and distances in their head. We begin here an investigation using a more realistic picture, based on findings in neuroscience. We call it a pre-semantics, as its meaning is not a description of the world, but of the brain, whose structure is (partly) determined by the world it reasons about. In the final section, we reconsider the components, and postulate that there are no atomic pictures, we can always look inside.