Conditionals in Context
MIT (2005)
| Abstract | "If you turn left at the next corner, you will see a blue house at the end of the street." That sentence -- a conditional -- might be true even though it is possible that you will not see a blue house at the end of the street when you turn left at the next corner. A moving van may block your view; the house may have been painted pink; a crow might swoop down and peck out your eyes. Still, in some contexts, we might ignore these possibilities and correctly assert the conditional. In this book, Christopher Gauker argues that such context-relativity is the key to understanding the semantics of conditionals. Contexts are defined as objective features of the situation in which a conversation takes place, and the semantic properties of sentences -- conditionals included -- are defined in terms of assertibility in a context. One of the primary goals of a theory of conditionals has to be to distinguish correctly between valid and invalid arguments containing conditionals. According to Gauker, an argument is valid if the conclusion is assertible in every context in which the premises are assertible. This runs counter to what Gauker sees as a systematic misreading of the data by other authors, who judge arguments to be invalid if they can think of a context in which the premises are judged true and some other context in which the conclusion is judged false. Different schools of thought on conditionals reflect fundamentally different approaches to semantics. Gauker offers his theory as a motive and test case for a distinctive kind of semantics that dispenses with reference relations and possible worlds. | |||||||||
| Keywords | conditionals semantics | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Buy the book | $35.00 direct from Amazon Amazon page | |||||||||
| Call number | P292.5.G38 2005 | |||||||||
| ISBN(s) | 0262572311 | |||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,672 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesDaniel Rothschild (2013). Do Indicative Conditionals Express Propositions? Noûs 47 (1):49-68.
Daniel Nolan (2003). Defending a Possible-Worlds Account of Indicative Conditionals. Philosophical Studies 116 (3):215-269.
Eric Swanson (2013). Subjunctive Biscuit and Stand-Off Conditionals. Philosophical Studies 163 (3):637-648.
Igor Douven (2007). On Bradley's Preservation Condition for Conditionals. Erkenntnis 67 (1):111 - 118.
Frank Jackson (ed.) (1991). Conditionals. Oxford University Press.
Edwin D. Mares & André Fuhrmann (1995). A Relevant Theory of Conditionals. Journal of Philosophical Logic 24 (6):645 - 665.
Keith DeRose (2010). The Conditionals of Deliberation. Mind 119 (473):1-42.
C. B. Cross (2007). Review: Conditionals in Context. [REVIEW] Mind 116 (464):1119-1122.
Christopher Gauker (1987). Conditionals in Context. Erkenntnis 27 (3):293 - 321.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-10-03Total downloads30 ( #40,824 of 549,069 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,185 of 549,069 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
