Is Stalnaker’s Semantics Complete?
Abstract It is shown that one common formulation of Stalnaker’s semantics for conditionals is incomplete: it has no sound and (strongly) complete proof system. At first, this seems to conflict with well-known completeness results for this semantics (e.g., Stalnaker and Thomason 1967, Stalnaker 1970 and Lewis 1973, ch. 6). As it turns out, it does not: these completeness results rely on another closely-related formulation of the semantics that is provably complete. Specifically, the difference comes down to how the Limit Assumption is stated. I close with some remarks about what this means for the logic of conditionals.
Authors
- Alexander W. Kocurek (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0912-1488)
Institutions
- University of California San Diego (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Erkenntnis
- Published
- 2025-02-18
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-025-00927-7
- Primary Topic
- Philosophy and Theoretical Science
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- Australian Research Council