Background
Stalnaker, Robert Culp was born on January 22, 1940 in Princeton. New Jersey.
Stalnaker, Robert Culp was born on January 22, 1940 in Princeton. New Jersey.
Wesleyan University and Princeton.
1965 8, Instructor, then Assistant, Yale. 1968-1971, Associate Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana. 1971-1989, Associate Professor, then Professor of Philosophy, Cornell.
Since 1994, Professor of Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Along with R. Thomason, Stalnaker invented the idea that a strong conditional is to count as true in a world i, if and only if its consequent is true in the possible world ‘nearest’ to i, where the antecedent of the conditional is true. The world i may be the actual world. This semantic analysis accounts for the fact that unlike, for example, the material conditional, counterfactuals are not subject to such logical rules as transitivity, strengthening the antecedent and contraposition. Stalnaker devised a propositional conditional logic on the basis of this idea and later, with Thomason, a first-order conditional logic, which they proved to be sound and complete. Thomason proved the propositional part of the logic to be effectively decidable and presented a natural deduction version of the logic. David Lewis, who developed similar ideas independently, has shown that Stalnaker's conditional logic is a special case within a cluster of such logics; and G. Hardegree was able to prove that the Stalnaker conditional is formally identical to the conditional in quantum logic. Among Stalnaker’s numerous other contributions to studies in the semantics and pragmatics of natural language is an attempt to develop an account of ‘that'-clauses which vindicates the idea of identifying a proposition with the set of possible worlds in which it is true.