Philosopher Robert Stalnaker solves problems the MIT way
While working in a famously esoteric field, MIT philosopher Robert Stalnaker has focused his career on thinking about real-world concerns — including the fundamental nature of speech, thought, and decision-making. In so doing, he has catalyzed and provided the underpinnings for new research in many other areas, such as game theory, linguistics, decision theory, and economics. In all these research areas, Stalnaker’s influence has been widespread and profound, but his impact on modern linguistics — a field that was just coming into its own in the 1970s — has been especially significant, providing the first clear understanding of what is going on in conditional sentences that are counterfactual. The language for alternatives and possible worlds A conditional sentence is one involves a condition: “If X ___.” A conditional, counterfactual sentence is one that also has a first clause that expresses something contrary to fact. Here’s an example of such a sentence: “If we had traveled...