RésuméCet article démontre qu'un exemple cité par Ernest Adams pour montrer que l'implication matérielle n'est pas l'interprétation correcte de la sémantique de la conjonction de subordination si, n'est rien d'autre qu'un corollaire d'une observation d'jà faite par Lewis Carroll, il y a cent ans, dans l'exposition de son paradoxe du salon de coiffure.

Half a century later, a Dretskean stance on epistemic closure remains a minority view. Why? Mainly because critics have successfully poked holes in the epistemologies on which closure fails. However, none of the familiar pro-closure moves works against the counterexamples on display here. It is argued that these counterexamples pose the following dilemma: either accept that epistemic closure principles are false, and steal the thunder from those who attack classical logic on the basis of similarly problematic cases—specifically, relevance logicians and (...) like-minded philosophers—or stick with closure and surrender to relevantist claims of failure in truth-preservation aimed at classical rules of inference. Classicist closure advocates find the promise of a way out of the dilemma in the works of Roy Sorensen and John Hawthorne. The paper argues against their pro-closure move and renews Robert Audi’s call for a theory of closure-failure. (shrink)

David Sanford's If P, Then Q is an ambitious book, aimed at two difficult tasks and addressed to two audiences. It combines a survey of historical and contemporary work on-conditionals with a presentation-of, Sanford's personal views. And it is addressed to both undergraduate students, without, logical training, and professionals seriously interested in conditionals. It is marred by the impossibility of achieving both aims in a book this size, and by the strains of simultaneously addressing audiences with such different needs and (...) interests. (shrink)