Counterfactual donkeys don’t get high

Abstract

I present data that suggest the universal entailments of counterfactual donkey sentences
aren’t as universal as some have claimed. I argue that this favors the strategy of attributing
these entailments to a special property of the similarity ordering on worlds provided by
some contexts, rather than to a semantically encoded sensitivity to assignment.
Keywords: donkey sentences, counterfactuals, conditionals, similarity, simplification.