Truth-Conditional Accounts of Indicative Conditionals Edited by Lee Walters (Oxford University)

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  1. Barbara Abbott, Some Remarks on Indicative Conditionals.
    We will look at several theories of indicative conditionals grouped into three categories: those that base its semantics on its logical counterpart (the material conditional); intensional analyses, which bring in alternative possible worlds; and a third subgroup which denies that indicative conditionals express propositions at all. We will also look at some problems for each kind of approach.
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  2. Barbara Abbott (2009). Part V. Back to Grice: Conditionals in English and Fopl. In Dingfang Shu & Ken Turner (eds.), Contrasting Meanings in Languages of the East and West. Peter Lang.
    In the 1960’s, both Montague (e.g. 1970, 222) and Grice (1975, 24) famously declared that natural languages were not so different from the formal languages of logic as people had thought. Montague sought to comprehend the grammars of both within a single theory, and Grice sought to explain away apparent divergences as due to the fact that the former, but not the latter, were used for conversation. But, if we confine our concept of logic to first order predicate logic (or (...)
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  3. Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1956). Conditional Sentence and Material Implication. Studia Logica 4 (1).
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  4. R. B. Angell (1986). Truth-Functional Conditionals and Modern Vs. Traditional Syllogistic. Mind 95 (378):210-223.
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  5. Rani Lill Anjum (2008). Three Dogmas of 'If'. In A. Leirfall & T. Sandmel (eds.), Enhet i Mangfold. Unipub.
    In this paper I argue that a truth functional account of conditional statements ‘if A then B’ not only is inadequate, but that it eliminates the very conditionality expressed by ‘if’. Focusing only on the truth-values of the statements ‘A’ and ‘B’ and different combinations of these, one is bound to miss out on the conditional relation expressed between them. But this is not a flaw only of truth functionality and the material conditional. All approaches that try to treat conditionals (...)
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  6. Rani Lill Anjum (2007). The Logic of `If' — or How to Philosophically Eliminate Conditional Relations. Sorites - A digital journal of analytic philosophy 19:51-57.
    In this paper I present some of Robert N. McLaughlin's critique of a truth functional approach to conditionals as it appears in his book On the Logic of Ordinary Conditionals. Based on his criticism I argue that the basic principles of logic together amount to epistemological and metaphysical implications that can only be accepted from a logical atomist perspective. Attempts to account for conditional relations within this philosophical framework will necessarily fail. I thus argue that it is not truth functionality (...)
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  7. Anthony Appiah (1984). Jackson on the Material Conditional. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 62 (1):77 – 81.
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  8. Anthony Appiah (1982). Conversation and Conditionals. Philosophical Quarterly 32 (129):327-338.
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  9. Lee C. Archie (1979). A Simple Defense of Material Implication. Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 20 (2):412-414.
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  10. Stephen Barker (1997). Material Implication and General Indicative Conditionals. Philosophical Quarterly 47 (187):195-211.
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  11. Stephen J. Barker (1993). Conditional Excluded Middle, Conditional Assertion, and 'Only If'. Analysis 53 (4):254 - 261.
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  12. Gunnar Björnsson (forthcoming). Towards a Radically Pragmatic Theory of If-Conditionals. In K. P. Turner (ed.), Making Semantics Pragmatic. Emerald.
    It is generally agreed that constructions of the form “if P, Q” are capable of conveying a number of different relations between antecedent and consequent, with pragmatics playing a central role in determining these relations. Controversy concerns what the conventional contribution of the if-clause is, how it constrains the pragmatic processes, and what those processes are. In this essay, I begin to argue that the conventional contribution of if-clauses to semantics is exhausted by the fact that these clauses introduce a (...)
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  13. Gunnar Björnsson (2008). Strawson on 'If' and ⊃. South African Journal of Philosophy 27 (3):24-35.
    This paper is concerned with Sir Peter Strawson’s critical discussion of Paul Grice’s defence of the material implication analysis of conditionals. It argues that although Strawson’s own ‘consequentialist’ suggestion concerning the meaning of conditionals cannot be correct, a related and radically contextualist account is able to both account for the phenomena that motivated Strawson’s consequentialism, and to undermine the material implication analysis by providing a simpler account of the processes that we go through when interpreting conditionals.
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  14. Eliza Block (2008). Indicative Conditionals in Context. Mind 117 (468):783-794.
    I discuss an argument given by Dorothy Edgington for the conclusion that indicative conditionals cannot express propositions. The argument is not effective against Robert Stalnaker's context-dependent propositional theory. I isolate and defend the feature of Stalnaker's theory that allows it to evade the argument.
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  15. Jean-François Bonnefon & Guy Politzer (2011). Pragmatics, Mental Models and One Paradox of the Material Conditional. Mind and Language 26 (2):141-155.
    Most instantiations of the inference ‘y; so if x, y’ seem intuitively odd, a phenomenon known as one of the paradoxes of the material conditional. A common explanation of the oddity, endorsed by Mental Model theory, is based on the intuition that the conclusion of the inference throws away semantic information. We build on this explanation to identify two joint conditions under which the inference becomes acceptable: (a) the truth of x has bearings on the relevance of asserting y; and (...)
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  16. Daniel Dohrn, What Zif.
    In a series of articles, David Barnett (2006, 2009, 2010) has developed a general theory of conditionals. The grand aim is to reconcile the two main rivals: a suppositional and a truth-conditional view (Barnett 2006, 521). While I confine my critical discussion to counterfactuals, I will give some hints how they might spell trouble for his suppositional view in general.
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  17. Frank Döring (1997). The Ramsey Test and Conditional Semantics. Journal of Philosophical Logic 26 (4):359-376.
    Proponents of the projection strategy take an epistemic rule for the evaluation of English conditionals, the Ramsey test, as clue to the truth-conditional semantics of conditionals. They also construe English conditionals as stronger than the material conditional. Given plausible assumptions, however, the Ramsey test induces the semantics of the material conditional. The alleged link between Ramsey test and truth conditions stronger than those of the material conditional can be saved by construing conditionals as ternary, rather than binary, (...)
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  18. Igor Douven (2007). On Bradley's Preservation Condition for Conditionals. Erkenntnis 67 (1):111 - 118.
    Bradley has argued that a truth-conditional semantics for conditionals is incompatible with an allegedly very weak and intuitively compelling constraint on the interpretation of conditionals. I argue that the example Bradley offers to motivate this constraint can be explained along pragmatic lines that are compatible with the correctness of at least one popular truth-conditional semantics for conditionals.
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  19. Dorothy Edgington (1986). ``Do Conditionals Have Truth-Conditions&Quot. Cr'itica 18 (52):3-30.
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  20. Jonathan St B. T. Evans (2005). The Social and Communicative Function of Conditional Statements. Mind and Society 4 (1):97-113.
    In this paper, I discuss conditionals as illocutionary speech acts whose interpretation depends upon the whole of the social context in which they are uttered and whose purpose is to affect the opinions and actions of others. I argue for a suppositional approach to conditional statements based in what philosophers call the Ramsey test and developing the psychological theory that conditionals elicit a process of hypothetical thinking in their listeners. By reference to the experimental psychological literature on conditionals, I show (...)
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  21. Joseph S. Fulda (forthcoming). How Do Politeness Conditionals Work? Pragmatics and Society.
    This note posits a mechanism by which "politeness conditionals" work and relates the mechanism to recent work by Van Canegem-Ardijns (2010, /Journal of Pragmatics/).
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  22. Joseph S. Fulda (2010). Vann McGee's Counterexample to Modus Ponens: An Enthymeme. Journal of Pragmatics 42 (1):271-273.
    Nested conditionals are indeed vexatious. This 'counterexample' to Modus Ponens relies for its apparent integrity on implicit premises in the background, which once disclosed show how and that this is not a counterexample at all. Modus Ponens is perhaps the most straightforward rule of all and has no counterexamples that I am aware of at all.
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  23. Joseph S. Fulda (2010). The Full Theory of Conditional Elements: Enumerating, Exemplifying, and Evaluating Each of the Eight Conditional Elements. Acta Analytica 25 (4):459-477.
    This paper presents a unified, more-or-less complete, and largely pragmatic theory of indicative conditionals as they occur in natural language, which is entirely truth-functional and does not involve probability. It includes material implication as a special—and the most important—case, but not as the only case. The theory of conditional elements, as we term it, treats if-statements analogously to the more familiar and less controversial other truth-functional compounds, such as conjunction and disjunction.
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  24. Joseph S. Fulda (2005). A Pragmatic, Truth-Functional Solution to a Logical Difficulty with Biconditionals Absent in Conditionals. Journal of Pragmatics 37 (9/12):1419-1425/2120.
    This article discusses what is sometimes called the third paradox of material implication. Readers choosing to download this piece should please be so kind as to respect the author's wishes and download the published corrigendum as well, which is available via the "other links" tab.
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  25. Todd M. Furman (2008). Making Sense of the Truth Table for Conditional Statements. Teaching Philosophy 31 (2):179-184.
    This essay provides an intuitive technique that illustrates why a conditional must be true when the antecedent is false and the consequent is either true or false. Other techniques for explaining the conditional’s truth table are unsatisfactory.
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  26. Anthony S. Gillies (2009). On Truth-Conditions for If (but Not Quite Only If ). Philosophical Review 118 (3):325-349.
    What we want to be true about ordinary indicative conditionals seems to be more than we can possibly get: there just seems to be no good way to assign truth-conditions to ordinary indicative conditionals. Some take this argument as reason to make our wantings more modest. Others take it to show that indicative conditionals don't have truth-conditions in the first place. But we have overlooked two possibilities for assigning truth-conditions to indicatives. What's more, those possibilities deliver what we want and (...)
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  27. Gilberto Gomes (2009). Are Necessary and Sufficient Conditions Converse Relations? Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (3):375 – 387.
    Claims that necessary and sufficient conditions are not converse relations are discussed, as well as the related claim that If A, then B is not equivalent to A only if B . The analysis of alleged counterexamples has shown, among other things, how necessary and sufficient conditions should be understood, especially in the case of causal conditions, and the importance of distinguishing sufficient-cause conditionals from necessary-cause conditionals. It is concluded that necessary and sufficient conditions, adequately interpreted, are converse relations in (...)
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  28. Gilberto Gomes (2006). If A, Then B Too, but Only If C: A Reply to Varzi. Analysis 66 (290):157–161.
  29. William H. Hanson (1991). Indicative Conditionals Are Truth-Functional. Mind 100 (1):53-72.
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  30. Héctor Hernández Ortiz & Joseph S. Fulda (2012). Strengthening the Antecedent, Concessive Conditionals, Conditional Rhetorical Questions, and the Theory of Conditional Elements. Journal of Pragmatics 44 (3):328-331.
    We show how the problem of strengthening the antecedent which is both formally valid and yet often intuitively invalid, concessive conditionals, and conditional rhetorical questions fit into the scheme put forth in Fulda (2010, /Acta Analytica/).
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  31. Frank Jackson (1979). On Assertion and Indicative Conditionals. Philosophical Review 88 (4):565-589.
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  32. Gernot D. Kleiter, How People Interpret an Uncertain If.
    Conditionals are central to inference. Before people can draw inferences about a natural language conditional, they must interpret its meaning. We investigated interpretation of uncertain conditionals using a probabilistic truth table task, focussing on (i) conditional event, (ii) material conditional, and (iii) conjunction interpretations. The order of object (shape) and feature (color) in each conditional’s antecedent and consequent was varied between participants. The conditional event was the dominant interpretation, followed by conjunction, and took longer to process than conjunction (mean difference (...)
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  33. David Lewis (1976). Probabilities of Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities. Philosophical Review 85 (3):297-315.
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  34. Daniel Nolan, Is Stalnaker Inconsistent About Indicative Conditionals?
    Robert Stalnaker’s formal semantics for his indicative conditional (which his 1975 paper takes over from his 1968 paper and Stalnaker and Thomason 1968) validate modus ponens, as one might expect. But they do so at the cost of a tension between his philosophical remarks in his 1975 paper and his formal constraints. Stalnaker commits himself to the following: he defines a “context set” as “the possible worlds not ruled out by the presupposed background information” (Stalnaker 1975 p 142). He later (...)
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  35. Daniel Nolan (2003). Defending a Possible-Worlds Account of Indicative Conditionals. Philosophical Studies 116 (3):215-269.
    One very popular kind of semantics for subjunctive conditionals is aclosest-worlds account along the lines of theories given by David Lewisand Robert Stalnaker. If we could give the same sort of semantics forindicative conditionals, we would have a more unified account of themeaning of ``if ... then ...'' statements, one with manyadvantages for explaining the behaviour of conditional sentences. Such atreatment of indicative conditionals, however, has faced a battery ofobjections. This paper outlines a closest-worlds account of indicativeconditionals that does better (...)
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  36. Adam Rieger (2006). A Simple Theory of Conditionals. Analysis 66 (3):233–240.
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  37. Daniel Rothschild, A Note on Conditionals and Restrictors.
    This note relates the Lewis/Kratzer view of conditionals as restrictors to the philosophical debate over the meaning of conditionals.
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  38. Roy A. Sorensen (1988). Dogmatism, Junk Knowledge, and Conditionals. Philosophical Quarterly 38 (153):433-454.
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  39. Ken Warmbrod (1981). An Indexical Theory of Conditionals. Dialogue, Canadian Philosophical Review 20 (4):644-664.
  40. Brian Weatherson (2001). Indicatives and Subjunctives. Philosophical Quarterly 51:200--216.
    This paper presents a new theory of the truth conditions for indicative conditionals. The theory allows us to give a fairly unified account of the semantics for indicative and subjunctive conditionals, though there remains a distinction between the two classes. Put simply, the idea behind the theory is that the distinction between the indicative and the subjunctive parallels the distinction between the necessary and the a priori. Since that distinction is best understood formally using the resources of two-dimensional modal logic, (...)
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  41. J. Robert G. Williams (2008). Conversation and Conditionals. Philosophical Studies 138 (2):211 - 223.
    I outline and motivate a way of implementing a closest world theory of indicatives, appealing to Stalnaker’s framework of open conversational possibilities. Stalnakerian conversational dynamics helps us resolve two outstanding puzzles for a such a theory of indicative conditionals. The first puzzle—concerning so-called ‘reverse Sobel sequences’—can be resolved by conversation dynamics in a theory-neutral way: the explanation works as much for Lewisian counterfactuals as for the account of indicatives developed here. Resolving the second puzzle, by contrast, relies on the interplay (...)
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  42. Timothy Williamson (2009). Conditionals and Actuality. Erkenntnis 70 (2):135 - 150.
    It is known that indicative and subjunctive conditionals interact differently with a rigidifying "actually" operator. The paper studies this difference in an abstract setting. It does not assume the framework of possible world semantics, characterizing "actually" instead by the type of logically valid formulas to which it gives rise. It is proved that in a language with such features all sentential contexts that are congruential (in the sense that they preserve logical equivalence) are extensional (in the sense that they preserve (...)
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  43. Timothy Williamson (2006). Indicative Versus Subjunctive Conditionals, Congruential Versus Non-Hyperintensional Contexts. Philosophical Issues 16 (1):310–333.
    §0. A familiar if obscure idea: an indicative conditional presents its consequent as holding in the actual world on the supposition that its antecedent so holds, whereas a subjunctive conditional merely presents its consequent as holding in a world, typically counterfactual, in which its antecedent holds. Consider this pair.
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