Abstract
Conditionals whose antecedent and consequent are not somehow internally connected tend to strike us as odd. The received doctrine is that this felt oddness is to be explained pragmatically. Exactly how the pragmatic explanation is supposed to go has remained elusive, however. This paper discusses recent philosophical and psychological work that attempts to account semantically for the apparent oddness of conditionals lacking an internal connection between their parts.
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Notes
The inferentialist semantics to be discussed further on in the paper is also explicitly meant to pertain to “conditional conditionals” only.
The Stoic philosopher Chrysippus is famous for having defended the view that a conditional is true iff the falsity of its consequent is incompatible with the truth of its antecedent (Kneale and Kneale 1962, Ch. 2).
This is the core of the proposal in Krzyżanowska et al. (2014). To this core, two clauses are added to take care of certain special cases. The details need not detain us here, except that for later purposes it should be mentioned that for a conditional to be true, its consequent should not just follow from background knowledge alone (unless it also follows from the antecedent alone).
For a summary of the main attempts to solve this problem, and some reasons for believing these attempts fail, see Douven (2011).
The defective truth table data are inconclusive in this respect, given that they contain no information about inferential connections perceived by the participants in the various experiments.
See Hadjichristidis et al. (2001), Evans and Handley (2003), Oberauer and Wilhelm (2003), Over and Evans (2003), Evans and Over (2004), Weidenfeld et al. (2005), Evans et al. (2007), Oaksford and Chater (2007), Oberauer et al. (2007), Over et al. (2007), Gauffroy and Barrouillet (2009), Douven and Verbrugge (2010, (2013), Pfeifer and Kleiter (2010), Politzer et al. (2010), Fugard et al. (2011), and Over et al. (2013).
Thanks to an anonymous referee here.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Janneke Huitink and to two anonymous referees for helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.
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It is a pleasure and an honor to contribute to this Festschrift celebrating Pascal Engel’s sixtieth birthday. When Pascal began working as an analytic philosopher in France, he must have felt like the villagers in the famous French comic strip Astérix, who were surrounded by Roman enemy troops who vastly outnumbered them but nevertheless firmly stood their ground. If this is no longer an accurate description of the situation of any European analytic philosopher, that is to a great extent owing to Pascal, who has done more for the dissemination of analytic philosophy on the European continent than anyone else. I dedicate this essay, in friendship and with affection, to Pascal.
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Douven, I. How to account for the oddness of missing-link conditionals. Synthese 194, 1541–1554 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0756-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0756-7