Online research in philosophy

Section 1 briefly examines three theories of indicative conditionals. The Suppositional Theory is defended, and shown to be incompatible with understanding conditionals in terms of truth conditions. Section 2 discusses the psychological evidence about conditionals reported by Over and Evans (this volume). Section 3 discusses the syntactic grounds offered by Haegeman (this volume) for distinguishing two sorts of conditional.

We examine the notion of conditionals and the role of conditionals in inductive logics and arguments. We identify three mistakes commonly made in the study of, or motivation for, non-classical logics. A nonmonotonic consequence relation based on evidential probability is formulated. With respect to this acceptance relation some rules of inference of System P are unsound, and we propose refinements that hold in our framework.

On the basis of impossibility results on probability, belief revision, and conditionals, it is argued that conditional beliefs differ from beliefs in conditionals qua mental states. Once this is established, it will be pointed out in what sense conditional beliefs are still conditional, even though they may lack conditional contents, and why it is permissible to still regard them as beliefs, although they are not beliefs in conditionals. Along the way, the main logical, dispositional, representational, and normative properties of conditional beliefs are studied, and it is explained how the failure of not distinguishing conditional beliefs from beliefs in conditionals can lead philosophical and empirical theories astray.

In this paper, we claim that the problem of conditionals should be dealt with by carefully distinguishing between thinking conditional propositions and conditional thinking, i.e. thinking on the basis of some supposition. This distinction deserves further investigation, if we are to make sense of some old and new experimental data concerning the understanding and the assertion of conditional sentences. Here we will argue that some of these data seem to refute the mental models theory of conditional reasoning, setting the ground for a different approach to the cognitive study of conditionals.

This paper presents ConR (Conditional R), a logic of conditionals based on Anderson and Belnap''s system R. A Routley-Meyer-style semantics for ConR is given for the system (the completeness of ConR over this semantics is proved in E. Mares and A. Fuhrmann, A Relevant Theory of Conditionals (unpublished MS)). Moreover, it is argued that adopting a relevant theory of conditionals will improve certain theories that utilize conditionals, i.e. Lewis'' theory of causation, Lewis'' dyadic deontic logic, and Chellas'' dyadic deontic logic.

I will describe the logics of a range of conditionals that behave like conditional probabilities at various levels of probabilistic support. Families of these conditionals will be characterized in terms of the rules that their members obey. I will show that for each conditional, , in a given family, there is a probabilistic support level r and a conditional probability function P such that, for all sentences C and B, C->B holds just in case P[B|C] is greater than or equal to r. Thus, each conditional in a given family behaves like conditional probability above some specific support level.

The overall strategy of Lycan’s paper is to distinguish three kinds of conditional assertion theories, and then to show, in order, how they are variously afflicted by a set of problems. The three kinds of theory were the Quine-Rhinelander theory (or the Simple Illocutionary theory), The Semanticized Quine-Rhinelander, and the No Truth Value theory (or NTV). This strategy offers considerable clarity, but it comes at a cost, for what I take to be the best version of a conditional assertion theory contains core parts of all three theories. In what follows, I will suggest that many of the objections offered by Lycan can be dealt when all the pieces are taken into consideration at the same time. But I will also suggest that a refined version of what Lycan called the Immediate Implausibility objection does show us that the conditional assertion theory is false.

I accept that 1 and 2 differ in truth-value, but see no reason why this requires two types of conditionals. Rather, the difference between 1 and 2 seems to me to be a difference in the antecedent and consequent conditions, flanking one and the same conditional. That is, I hold that the difference between 1 and 2 should not be thought of as per the schema: 1a. p C1 q 2a. p C2 q where C1 and C2 are two different types of conditionals. The difference is better conceived via the schema: 1b. p1 C q1 2b. p2 C q2 which features a single type of conditional C flanked by different antecedent and consequent conditions: indicative and subjunctive conditions, respectively.

This paper develops an interpretation of the fourth account of conditionals in Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism that conceptually links it with contemporary ?relevance? interpretations of entailment. It is argued that the third account of conditionals, which analyzes the truth of a conditional in terms of the joint impossibility of antecedent and denial of consequent, should not be interpreted in terms of a relative incompatibility of antecedent and denial of consequent because of Stoic acceptance of the truth of some conditionals of the form p ? ?p and its converse. Rather, it is suggested, ancient attempts to avoid the so-called paradoxes of implication involve the fourth account of conditionals. I hypothesize that this account is related to Stoic attempts to define truth conditions for conditionals in terms of a theory of the concludency (validity) of arguments in opposition to the more common procedure (represented by the first three accounts of conditionals) of specifying truth conditions for conditionals ?semantically? and using those truth conditions in the development of a theory of argument validity.

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 proposition without presenting it as true so that the consequent can be understood in relation to it. Given our cognitive interests in such non-truth-presentational introductions, conditionals will make salient the wide but nevertheless disciplined variety of contents that we naturally attribute to them; no further substantial constraints of the sorts proposed by standard theories of conditionals are needed to explain the phenomena. If this is correct, it provides prima facie evidence for a radically contextualist account of conditionals according to which conditionals have no truth-evaluable or intuitively complete content absent some contextually provided, sufficiently salient relation between antecedent and consequent.