Angelika Kratzer

My 1981 paper Partition and Revision presented a premise semantics for counterfactuals that attributed their indeterminacy and context dependency to the many ways the facts of a world hang together - form 'lumps', that is. This paper is an investigation of lumping relations and their role in explaining certain puzzles of counterfactual reasoning. The version listed here is the 1989 version of the paper. My 2012 book 'Modals and Conditionals', chapter 5, has a thoroughly expanded and updated version. Please consult and refer to the 2012 version when you want to cite this work. Lumping relations rely on a semantics based on partial possible worlds or situations. A situation semantics opens up entirely new possibilities for the analysis of counterfactuals and has also led to progress in other areas of semantics, but it does so at a price. There are now many possible denotations for even the most basic logical words. Are there guidelines that help us pick the right ones? If there are several possible denotations for a given logical word, all equally plausible, do we find the expected ambiguities? About a third of the paper wrestles with those questions – primarily quantifiers and negation - before a framework is in place for the discussion of counterfactual reasoning proper in the rest of the paper.