Imperative-or-declarative and practical triviality

Abstract

We draw attention to a novel puzzle concerning imperative-or-declarative disjunctions. To solve this puzzle, we introduce a notion of practical triviality: a sentence is practically trivial if it produces no effect on the addressee’s preference structure. We spell out this analysis formally using a new formulation of preference semantics (e.g., Starr, 2020) according to which preference relations are defined over worlds rather than over propositions.