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On Bradley’s preservation condition for conditionals

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Abstract

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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Acknowledgements

I am greatly indebted to Richard Bradley, Raf De Clercq, Kevin Demiddele, Jan Heylen, Leon Horsten, Christopher von Bülow, and two referees for this journal for valuable comments. Versions of this paper have been presented at the University of Leuven and at Erasmus University Rotterdam. I am grateful to the audiences on those occasions for their stimulating questions and remarks.

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Correspondence to Igor Douven.

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Douven, I. On Bradley’s preservation condition for conditionals. Erkenntnis 67, 111–118 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9043-4

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