Semantic Modeling between Empirical Data and Norms of Rationality: The Case of Conditionals - Jan Sprenger (Università di Torino)

This talk is a methodological reflection about how semanticists construct theories of the meaning of conditionals. The main question is whether such theories contribute to a theory of human cognition, or whether they are doing something else (e.g., providing normative standards for hypothetical reasoning). To this end, I analyse some central notions (“semantic competence”, “semantic facts”) from a philosophy of science perspective and I discuss the question of the empirical evaluation of such theories.