.jpg?width=500 "Kant")
PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
Philosopher
American philosopher of language — possible worlds, the Stalnaker conditional and common ground
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (emeritus) · United States · d. 22 January 1940
An American philosopher, emeritus at MIT, whose work made possible-worlds semantics a tool for the philosophy of language and mind. His 1968 theory of conditionals gave the 'Stalnaker conditional', and Inquiry (1984) set out his view of content as sets of possible worlds. He analysed assertion as narrowing a conversation's 'common ground', and contributed to two-dimensional semantics and the study of self-locating belief.
A fifteen-page paper from 1978 modelled conversation as the narrowing of a set of live possibilities. In 2026 the vocabulary turns up in AI research on whether chatbots grasp the unsaid. We set out Robert Stalnaker's theory, and the care needed before saying a language model 'tracks common ground'.
David Chalmers, Robert Stalnaker
