Three confirmation principles discussed by Hempel are the Converse Consequence Condition, the Special Consequence Condition and the Entailment Condition. Le Morvan (1999) has argued that, when the choice among confirmation principles is just about them, it is the Converse Consequence Condition that must be rejected. In this paper, I make this argument definitive. In doing that, I will provide an indisputable proof that the simple conjunction of the Converse Consequence Condition and the Entailment Condition yields a (...) disastrous consequence. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a proof that a disastrous conclusion (namely, that any observation report confirms any hypothesis) may be derived directly from two principles of qualitative confirmation which Carl Hempel called the "Converse Consequence Condition" and the "Entailment Condition." I then discuss three strategies which a defender of the Converse Consequence Condition may deploy to save this principle.

Organisational planning processes often materialise as a series of meetings, where the future of the organisation is jointly discussed and negotiated as a part of local decision-making sequences. Using conversation and discourse analytical approaches, this article investigates how proposals concerning the future can also be resisted by employing a specific device, a conditional construction. The data for the study originate from a city organisation, whose customer services are being developed. The results show how the conditional constructions work in two interrelated (...) ways. First, by introducing a problematic hypothetical situation, they outline the undesirable consequences of the proposed idea in real work life. Second, by highlighting the experience of the customer, they present the organisation as benefitting from the potential rejection of the idea. The article discusses the implications of the results for the study of proposal and decision-making sequences in longitudinal, multisemiotic discursive processes. (shrink)

This argument defends Hempel's rejection of the converse-consequence condition and argues against Baruch Brody's attempt to revive "something like" it.

Inference versus consequence , an invited lecture at the LOGICA 1997 conference at Castle Liblice, was part of a series of articles for which I did research during a Stockholm sabbatical in the autumn of 1995. The article seems to have been fairly effective in getting its point across and addresses a topic highly germane to the Uppsala workshop. Owing to its appearance in the LOGICA Yearbook 1997 , Filosofia Publishers, Prague, 1998, it has been rather inaccessible. Accordingly it (...) is republished here with only bibliographical changes and an afterword. (shrink)

Conditional excluded middle (CEM) is the following principe of counterfactual logic: either, if it were the case that φ, it would be the case that ψ, or, if it were the case that φ, it would be the case that not-ψ. I will first show that CEM entails the identity of indiscernibles, the falsity of physicalism, and the failure of the modal to supervene on the categorical and of the vague to supervene on the precise. I will then argue that (...) we should accept these startling conclusions, since CEM is valid. (shrink)

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.

This elementary 4-page paper is a preliminary survey of some of the most important uses of ‘condition’ and ‘consequence’ in American Philosophy. A more comprehensive treatment is being written. Your suggestions, questions, and objections are welcome. A statement of a conditional need not be a conditional statement and conditional statement need not be a statement of a conditional.

Objectives: To present an analysis of “futility” that is useful in the clinical setting.Design: Literature review.Material and methods: According to Medline more than 750 articles have been published about medical futility. Three criteria singled out 43 of them. The authors' opinions about futility were analysed using the scheme: “If certain conditions are satisfied, then a particular measure is futile” and “If a particular measure is futile, then certain moral consequences are implied”.Results: Regarding conditions, most authors stated that judgments about futility (...) should be made by physicians. The measure was usually some kind of medical treatment, and the goals related to quality of life, physiological improvement, or prolongation of life. The probability of success in reaching the goal was in most cases described in semiquantitative terms. Regarding consequences, the authors stated that health care professionals may withhold or withdraw a futile measure, most often after a dialogue with the patient , but sometimes without informing the patient , or with one-way information . Over time more and more articles recommend that the patient should be involved in joint decision making. Based on this literature review a clinical model was developed.Conclusions: The model, requiring that conditions and consequences should be made explicit, may, in “futility situations”, facilitate both the collection of the necessary information and make the moral implications visible. It also makes communication about measures considered to be futile possible without using such ambiguous terms as “futile”. (shrink)

An analysis of necessary condition and presupposition reveals that, as logical relations, these notions are basically similar to each other and different from the notion of entailment or other ‘if-then’ relations of logical consequence. Both necessary condition and presupposition seem to be two-directional in a rather peculiar way. Appreciating this is helpful in interpreting philosophers such as Kant and Strawson who have relied extensively on these relations in constructing the philosophical arguments often referred to as transcendental arguments. It also (...) suggests some fundamental shortcomings in Strawson's account of presupposition and in the logician's way of presenting necessary condition using ‘⊂'.In the discussion which follows I shall exhibit some of the differences between necessary condition and presupposition on the one hand and entailment on the other. I shall then go on to offer an explanation of these differences in conjunction with an analysis of necessary condition and presupposition which diverges from other contemporaty accounts. Once these distinctions and explanations have been stated, I shall make some suggestions about their relevance to the interpretation and assessment of philosophical texts and arguments. (shrink)

For an indicative conditional to be true it is not generally sufficient that its antecedent be false or its consequent true. I propose to analyse such a conditional as strong, i.e. as containing a tacit quantification over a domain of possible situations, with the if-clause specifying that domain such that the conditional gets assigned the appropriate truth conditions. Now, one definition of logical consequence proceeds in terms of a natural-language conditional. Interpreting it as strong leads to a paraconsistent (...) class='Hi'>consequence relation, though the motivation behind it is not to reason coherently about contradictions but to reason entirely without them. (shrink)

We extend the Embracing Revenge account of the semantic paradoxes by constructing two distinct consequence relations that reflect, in different ways, the transfinitely-many-valued semantics developed in earlier work. In particular, we adapt the underlying ideas of “gappy” approaches based on K3, and “glutty” approaches based on LP, to the Embracing Revenge framework, by treating the infinitely many non-classical truth values as infinitely many ways that a sentence might fail to receive a classical truth value in the former case, and (...) as infinitely many ways that a sentence might receive both classical truth values in the latter. In order to obtain deductive systems that are very nearly classical, we need to utilize different conditionals (and different negations) in each logic. (shrink)

In their commentaries on Peter of Spain’s texts, two professors at the University of Cracow, John of Glogovia and Michael of Biestrzykowa, provided interpretations of consequences and conditional propositions which either rejected the paradoxes of strict implication or placed on them such restrictions as to challenge traditional views about the relation between antecedent and consequent. Nicholas Copernicus may have been inflenced by those discussions.

Reasoning with conditionals is central to everyday life, yet there is long-standing disagreement about the meaning of the conditional. One example is the puzzle of so-called missing-link conditionals such as "if raccoons have no wings, they cannot breathe under water." Their oddity may be taken to show that conditionals require a connection between antecedent ("raccoons have no wings") and consequent ("they cannot breathe under water"), yet most accounts of conditionals attribute the oddity to natural language pragmatics. (...) We present an experimental study disentangling the pragmatic requirement of discourse coherence from a stronger notion of connection: probabilistic relevance. Results indicate that mere discourse coherence is not enough to make conditionals assertable. (shrink)

Assuming “Schanuel's Condition” for a certain class of exponential fields, Sturm's technique for polynomials in real closed fields can be extended to more complicated exponential terms in the corresponding exponential field. Hence for this class of terms the exact number of zeros can be calculated. These results give deeper insights into the model theory of exponential fields. MSC: 03C65, 03C60, 12L12.

Transparency is an increasingly prominent area of research that offers valuable insights for organizational studies. However, conceptualizations of transparency are rarely subject to critical scrutiny and thus their relevance remains unclear. In most accounts, transparency is associated with the sharing of information and the perceived quality of the information shared. This narrow focus on information and quality, however, overlooks the dynamics of organizational transparency. To provide a more structured conceptualization of organizational transparency, this article unpacks the assumptions that shape the (...) extant literature, with a focus on three dimensions: conceptualizations, conditions, and consequences. The contribution of the study is twofold: On a conceptual level, we provide a framework that articulates two paradigmatic positions underpinning discussions of transparency, verifiability approaches and performativity approaches; on an analytical level, we suggest a novel future research agenda for studying organizational transparency that pays attention to its dynamics, paradoxes, and performative characteristics. (shrink)

By and large, the conditional connective in three-valued logic has two different functions. First, by means of a deduction theorem, it can express a specific relation of logical consequence in the logical language itself. Second, it can represent natural language structures such as "if/then'' or "implies''. This chapter surveys both approaches, shows why none of them will typically end up with a three-valued material conditional, and elaborates on connections to probabilistic reasoning.

In this brief note I show how to model conceptual change, logical learning, and revision of one's beliefs in response to conditional information such as indicative conditionals that do not express propositions.

In recognition of the central place that the concept of tragedy holds in the historical understanding of culture and society, this paper features an analysis of its presence, current state, and value in the digital environments of the postmodern era, with special attention to videogames. Thus, the overcoming of a classic model of tragedy in the cybertextual condition is first determined, along with the discursive dimension underlying said overcoming. To this end a theoretical statement to the issue of tragedy is (...) proposed, from the perspective of the cybertext as procedural rhetoric. This will establish the formulation of a semiotic analytical model that problematizes Greimas’ actantial system under the light of the digital and interactive reality of videogames. To avoid this constraint, we propose to attach a new variable to the base of the generative trajectory: the “configurative synthesis,” product of the so-called “gaming/playing function.” This addition will integrate the figures of the game and the player in the dynamic distinction of the “quasi-Actant.” Finally, a sample of 79 cases will be observed in regards to the implications of the cybertextual notion of tragedy to the narrative and discourse of videogames. (shrink)

We introduce -ranked preferential structures and combine them with an accessibility relation. -ranked preferential structures are intermediate between simple preferential structures and ranked structures. The additional accessibility relation allows us to consider only parts of the overall -ranked structure. This framework allows us to formalize contrary to duty obligations, and other pictures where we have a hierarchy of situations, and maybe not all are accessible to all possible worlds. Representation results are proved.

In this paper I offer an explanation for the fact that QR tends to be more local than other types of A-bar movement (i.e., in typical cases, QR cannot take place out of a finite clause). My explanation assumes (and offers evidence for) the Phase Impenetrability Condition (cf. Chomsky 2001a, b) and an Economy Condition that requires that each step of (possibly successive cyclic) QR be motivated (cf. Fox 1999). After showing why QR is local in typical cases, I consider (...) new evidence, involving a counterpart of ACD in Italian, which indicates that QR takes place long distance, as other types of A-bar movement do, whenever each step is independently motivated. It follows that it can be maintained that the locality conditions on QR are not construction specific, as expected given the general format of the theory. (shrink)

An energy condition, in the context of a wide class of spacetime theories, is, crudely speaking, a relation one demands the stress-energy tensor of matter satisfy in order to try to capture the idea that "energy should be positive". The remarkable fact I will discuss in this paper is that such simple, general, almost trivial seeming propositions have profound and far-reaching import for our understanding of the structure of relativistic spacetimes. It is therefore especially surprising when one also learns that (...) we have no clear understanding of the nature of these conditions, what theoretical status they have with respect to fundamental physics, what epistemic status they may have, when we should and should not expect them to be satisfied, and even in many cases how they and their consequences should be interpreted physically. Or so I shall argue, by a detailed analysis of the technical and conceptual character of all the standard conditions used in physics today, including examination of their consequences and the circumstances in which they are believed to be violated. (shrink)

This text centers around three main subjects. The first is the concept of modularity and independence in classical logic and nonmonotonic and other nonclassical logic, and the consequences on syntactic and semantical interpolation and language change. In particular, we will show the connection between interpolation for nonmonotonic logic and manipulation of an abstract notion of size. Modularity is essentially the ability to put partial results achieved independently together for a global result. The second aspect of the book is the authors' (...) uniform picture of conditionals, including many-valued logics and structures on the language elements themselves and on the truth value set. The third topic explained by the authors is neighbourhood semantics, their connection to independence, and their common points and differences for various logics, e.g., for defaults and deontic logic, for the limit version of preferential logics, and for general approximation"--Publisher. (shrink)

Forty years ago, Vaughn Ball demonstrated that the then received notion of conditional relevance served no useful purpose, as it would only come into effect if the probability of an element were 0.0. But, if the probability of an element were 0.0, a directed verdict would be in order and so once again conditional relevancy was doing no work. I extended that analysis to include the relationship between proffers of evidence and facts of consequence to demonstrate that the work (...) that conditional relevancy was supposedly doing was isomorphic to that done by relevancy in all significant ways, and yet the Federal Rules of Evidence provide different standards for the two situations to determine admissibility. I thus proposed an amendment to FRE 104(b) to provide for the same standard to be applied to ‘relevancy’ and ‘conditional relevancy’. In a recent article, Matthew Kotzen appears to subject this work to intense scrutiny and criticism, yet at the same time reaches, so far as I can tell, identical conclusions. This raises the question, which I examine, whether this is an example of cross-disciplinary difficulties in communication. (shrink)

Affirming the consequent is a fallacious form of reasoning in formal logic that occurs when the minor premise of a propositional syllogism affirms the consequent of a conditional statement. A conditional statement is an “if‐then” sentence that expresses a link between the antecedent (the part after the “if”) and the consequent (the part after the “then”). A conditional statement does not assert either the antecedent or the consequent. It simply claims that if the antecedent is true, then the consequent is (...) also true. Although affirming the consequent is an invalid argument form and sometimes mistaken for, the valid argument form modus ponens. Modus ponens is a valid argument form in Western philosophy because the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion; however, affirming the consequent is an invalid argument form because the truth of the premises does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion. (shrink)

By and large, the conditional connective in three-valued logic has two different functions. First, by means of a deduction theorem, it can express a specific relation of logical consequence in the logical language itself. Second, it can represent natural language structures such as "if/then'" or "implies''. This chapter surveys both approaches, shows why none of them will typically end up with a three-valued material conditional, and elaborates on connections to probabilistic reasoning.

Hohfeld’s analysis on the different types of rights and duties is highly influential in analytical legal theory, and it is considered as a fundamental theory in AI&Law and normative multi-agent systems. Yet a century later, the formalization of this theory remains, in various ways, unresolved. In this paper I provide a formal analysis of how the working of a system containing Hohfeldian rights and duties can be delineated. This formalization starts from using the same tools as the classical ones by (...) Kanger and Lindahl used, but instead of focusing on the algebraic features of rights and duties, it aims at providing a comprehensive analysis of what these rights and duties actually are and how they behave and at saying something substantial on Power too—maintaining all along the Hohfeldian intentions that these rights and duties are sui generis and inherently relational. (shrink)

What does it mean to be an aesthetic beholder? Is it different than simply being a perceiver? Most theories of aesthetic perception focus on 1) features of the perceived object and its presentation or 2) on psychological evaluative or emotional responses and intentions of perceiver and artist. In this chapter I propose that we need to look at the process of engaged perception itself, and further that this temporal process of be- coming a beholder must be understood in its embodied, (...) contextual and dynamic speci- ficity. Through both phenomenological and neuroscientific explorations I analyze what is characteristic about a more “aesthetic stance” and argue that there is a certain asym- metry between beholder and beheld, which has to do with a disengagement of goal- directed action, and which allows for other kinds of perceptual involvement than in a more “practical stance”. It is a multi-disciplinary project integrating a sensorimotor no- tion of aesthetic affordances, 18th century philosophy, and large-scale brain network findings. What ensues is a new dynamic framework for future empirical and theoretical research on aesthetic perception. (shrink)

Erasme l'avançait : «On ne naît pas humain, on le devient.» Mais comment peut-on le devenir? Quelles évolutions, quelles contraintes doit-on accepter, dès l'enfance puis tout au long de son existence, pour pouvoir vivre véritablement comme un homme? Et en quoi la société dans laquelle nous vivons favorise-t-elle ou empêche-t-elle ce parcours vers l'humanisation? Autant de questions que Jean-Pierre Lebrun travaille à clarifier depuis de très nombreuses années. Refusant à la fois la nostalgie d'un passé idéalisé et d'être aveuglé par (...) les sirènes du «progrès», il se demande si nous sommes encore capables, voire soucieux, de désirer. Sachant que le désir, le propre de l'homme, a affaire au langage et au manque. Et qu'il se différencie de la jouissance, comblante et par là même mortifère. Or notre société dite néolibérale, imposant la recherche éperdue de ladite jouissance, confondant égalité et égalitarisme, affaiblissant la fonction paternelle au nom du rejet, certes légitime, du patriarcat, tend à dévaloriser tout ce qu'implique la condition humaine. Ce qui a des conséquences majeures, et très concrètes, qu'explore ici Jean-Pierre Lebrun, dans tous les domaines de la vie individuelle et collective : la politique, l'éducation, la culture, le psychisme et ses pathologies, mais aussi la vie conjugale ou les modes de consommation. Une réflexion profonde mais accessible, du point de vue de la psychanalyse, sur les problèmes cruciaux que doit affronter l'homme contemporain. (shrink)

Many conditionals seem to convey the existence of a link between their antecedent and consequent. We draw on a recently proposed typology of conditionals to argue for an old philosophical idea according to which the link is inferential in nature. We show that the proposal has explanatory force by presenting empirical results on the evidential meaning of certain English and Dutch modal expressions.

Conditional learning, where agents learn a conditional sentence ‘If A, then B,’ is difficult to incorporate into existing Bayesian models of learning. This is because conditional learning is not uniform: in some cases, learning a conditional requires decreasing the probability of the antecedent, while in other cases, the antecedent probability stays constant or increases. I argue that how one learns a conditional depends on the causal structure relating the antecedent and the consequent, leading to a causal model of conditional learning. (...) This model extends traditional Bayesian learning by incorporating causal models into agents’ epistemic states. On this theory, conditional learning proceeds in two steps. First, an agent learns a new causal model with the appropriate relationship between the antecedent and the consequent. Then, the agent narrows down the set of possible worlds to include only those which make the conditional proposition true. This model of learning can incorporate both standard cases of Bayesian learning and the non-uniform learning required to learn conditional information. (shrink)

This paper contains a detailed account of the notion of admissibility in the setting of consequence relations. It is proved that the two notions of admissibility used in the literature coincide, and it provides an extension to multi–conclusion consequence relations that is more general than the one usually encountered in the literature on admissibility. The notion of a rule scheme is introduced to capture rules with side conditions, and it is shown that what is generally understood under the (...) extension of a consequence relation by a rule can be extended naturally to rule schemes, and that such extensions capture the intuitive idea of extending a logic by a rule. (shrink)

Critique of prevailing textbook conception of sufficient conditions and necessary conditions as a truth functional relation of material implication (p->q)/(~q->~p). Explanation of common sense conception of condition as correlative of consequence, involving dependence. Utility of this conception exhibited in resolving puzzles regarding ontology, truth, and fatalism.

This paper investigates whether 'even if A, B' is pragmatically polysemic, so that a nonconcessive conditional may have 'even if', and whether concessive conditionals, pragmatically defined, can fail to have 'even if' or a non-temporal 'still'. Different paraphrases are used to help elucidate pragmatic meanings. A theory of the pragmatic meanings of concessive and implicative conditionals is presented. The semantic meaning of 'even if' and the question of whether concessive conditionals imply the truth of their consequents are (...) also discussed. (shrink)

In previous published research (“Conditionals and Inferential Connections: A Hypothetical Inferential Theory,” Cognitive Psychology, 2018), we investigated experimentally what role the presence and strength of an inferential connection between a conditional’s antecedent and consequent plays in how people process that conditional. Our analysis showed the strength of that connection to be strongly predictive of whether participants evaluated the conditional as true, false, or neither true nor false. In this article, we re-analyse the data from our previous research, now focussing (...) on the semantics of conditionals rather than on how they are processed. Specifically, we use those data to compare the main extant semantics with each other and with inferentialism, a semantics according to which the truth of a conditional requires the presence of an inferential connection between the conditional’s component parts. (shrink)

What is the connection between valid inference and true conditionals? Many conditional logics require that when A is a logical consequence of B, "if B then A" is true. Taking counterlogical conditionals seriously leads to systems that permit counterexamples to that general rule. However, this leaves those of us who endorse non-trivial accounts of counterpossible conditionals to explain what the connection between conditionals and consequence is. The explanation of the connection also answers a common (...) line of objection to non-trivial counterpossibles, which is based on a transition from valid arguments to the corresponding conditionals. It also contributes to the wider project of illuminating the connections between contexts of utterance, on the one hand, and the truth-conditions of conditionals uttered in those contexts, on the other. (shrink)

A number of papers have argued in favour of the material account of indicative conditionals, but typically they either concentrate on defending the account from the charge that it has counterintuitive consequences, or else focus on some particular positive argument in favour of the theory. In this paper, I survey the various positive arguments that can be given, presenting simple versions where possible and showing the connections between them. I conclude with some methodological considerations.

Recent studies indicate that indicative conditionals like "If people wear masks, the spread of Covid-19 will be diminished" require a probabilistic dependency between their antecedents and consequents to be acceptable (Skovgaard-Olsen et al., 2016). But it is easy to make the slip from this claim to the thesis that indicative conditionals are acceptable only if this probabilistic dependency results from a causal relation between antecedent and consequent. According to Pearl (2009), understanding a causal relation involves multiple, hierarchically organized (...) conceptual dimensions: prediction, intervention, and counterfactual dependence. In a series of experiments, we test the hypothesis that these conceptual dimensions are differentially encoded in indicative and counterfactual conditionals. If this hypothesis holds, then there are limits as to how much of a causal relation is captured by indicative conditionals alone. Our results show that the acceptance of indicative and counterfactual conditionals can become dissociated. Furthermore, it is found that the acceptance of both is needed for accepting a causal relation between two co-occurring events. The implications that these findings have for the hypothesis above, and for recent debates at the intersection of the psychology of reasoning and causal judgment, are critically discussed. Our findings are consistent with viewing indicative conditionals as answering predictive queries requiring evidential relevance (even in the absence of direct causal relations). Counterfactual conditionals in contrast target causal relevance, specifically. Finally, we discuss the implications our results have for the yet unsolved question of how reasoners succeed in constructing causal models from verbal descriptions. (shrink)

It is widely accepted among medical ethicists that competence is a necessary condition for informed consent. In this view, if a patient is incompetent to make a particular treatment decision, the decision must be based on an advance directive or made by a substitute decision-maker on behalf of the patient. We call this the competence model. According to a recent report of the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights, article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of (...) Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) presents a wholesale rejection of the competence model. The High Commissioner here adopts the interpretation of article 12 proposed by the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. On this interpretation, CRPD article 12 renders it impermissible to deny persons with mental disabilities the right to make treatment decisions on the basis of impaired decision-making capacity and demands the replacement of all regimes of substitute decision-making by supported decision-making. In this paper, we explicate six adverse consequences of CRPD article 12 for persons with mental disabilities and propose an alternative way forward. The proposed model combines the strengths of the competence model and supported decision-making. (shrink)

A conversation can be conceived as aiming to circumscribe a set of possibilities that are relevant to the goals of the conversation. This set of possibilities may be conceived as determined by the goals and objective circumstances of the interlocutors and not by their propositional attitudes. An indicative conditional can be conceived as circumscribing a set of possibilities that have a certain property: If the set of relevant possibilities is subsequently restricted to one in which the antecedent holds, then it (...) will be restricted as well to one in which the consequent holds. We will identify a number of desiderata concerning the validity of arguments; we will develop a formally precise semantics for conditionals conceived in this way that satisfies the desiderata, and we will present a deductive calculus that is sound and complete with respect to the semantics. Finally, we will argue that the semantics compares well, both formally and foundationally, with two other semantic theories of indicative conditionals that satisfy the desiderata, namely, those of Gillies and Bledin. (shrink)

Modus ponens is the argument from premises of the form If A, then B and A to the conclusion B. Nearly all participants agree that the modus ponens conclusion logically follows when the argument appears in this Basic form. However, adding a further premise can lower participants’ rate of agreement—an effect called suppression. We propose a theory of suppression that draws on contemporary ideas about conditional sentences in linguistics and philosophy. Semantically, the theory assumes that people interpret an indicative conditional (...) as a context-sensitive strict conditional: true if and only if its consequent is true in each of a contextually determined set of situations in which its antecedent is true. Pragmatically, the theory claims that context changes in response to new assertions, including new conditional premises. Thus, the conclusion of a modus ponens argument may no longer be accepted in the changed context. Psychologically, the theory describes people as capable of reasoning about broad classes of possible situations, ordered by typicality, without having to reason about individual possible worlds. The theory accounts for the main suppression phenomena, and it generates some novel predictions that new experiments confirm. (shrink)

I argue that taking the Practical Conditionals Thesis seriously demands a new understanding of the semantics of such conditionals. Practical Conditionals Thesis: A practical conditional [if A][ought] expresses B’s conditional preferability given A Paul Weirich has argued that the conditional utility of a state of affairs B on A is to be identified as the degree to which it is desired under indicative supposition that A. Similarly, exploiting the PCT, I will argue that the proper analysis of (...) indicative practical conditionals is in terms of what is planned, desired, or preferred, given suppositional changes to an agent’s information. Implementing such a conception of conditional preference in a semantic analysis of indicative practical conditionals turns out to be incompatible with any approach which treats the indicative conditional as expressing non-vacuous universal quantification over some domain of relevant antecedent-possibilities. Such analyses, I argue, encode a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is to be best, given some condition. The analysis that does the best vis-à-vis the PCT is, instead, one that blends a Context-Shifty account of indicative antecedents with an Expressivistic, or non-propositional, treatment of their practical consequents. (shrink)

This paper argues that the technical notion of conditional probability, as given by the ratio analysis, is unsuitable for dealing with our pretheoretical and intuitive understanding of both conditionality and probability. This is an ontological account of conditionals that include an irreducible dispositional connection between the antecedent and consequent conditions and where the conditional has to be treated as an indivisible whole rather than compositional. The relevant type of conditionality is found in some well-defined group of conditional statements. As (...) an alternative, therefore, we briefly offer grounds for what we would call an ontological reading: for both conditionality and conditional probability in general. It is not offered as a fully developed theory of conditionality but can be used, we claim, to explain why calculations according to the RATIO scheme does not coincide with our intuitive notion of conditional probability. What it shows us is that for an understanding of the whole range of conditionals we will need what John Heil (2003), in response to Quine (1953), calls an ontological point of view. (shrink)

The authors outline a theory of conditionals of the form If A then C and If A then possibly C. The 2 sorts of conditional have separate core meanings that refer to sets of possibilities. Knowledge, pragmatics, and semantics can modulate these meanings. Modulation can add information about temporal and other relations between antecedent and consequent. It can also prevent the construction of possibilities to yield 10 distinct sets of possibilities to which conditionals can refer. The mental representation (...) of a conditional normally makes explicit only the possibilities in which its antecedent is true, yielding other possibilities implicitly. Reasoners tend to focus on the explicit possibilities. The theory predicts the major phenomena of understanding and reasoning with conditionals. (shrink)

This chapter provides broad coverage of the notion of logical consequence, exploring its modal, semantic, and epistemic aspects. It develops the contrast between proof-theoretic notion of consequence, in terms of deduction, and a model-theoretic approach, in terms of truth-conditions. The main purpose is to relate the formal, technical work in logic to the philosophical concepts that underlie reasoning.

It is often thought that the test for whether an indicative conditional is assertible is to first suppose the antecedent and then check to see if the consequent is probable on that supposition. Call this procedure the “Ramsey Test”. Some influential accounts of indicative conditionals hold that the Ramsey Test works because indicative conditionals are used to express a high credence in the consequent conditional on the antecedent. In this paper I will argue that a different expressivist account, (...) one inspired by Brandom can handle a wider range of phenomena. In particular, it does a better job explaining how conditionals function in modus tollens arguments. I will end by discussing how the account proposed here goes beyond Brandom’s own work on logic and hermeneutics. Of particular importance is the role played by a conversational common ground, distinct from the commitments of the interpreter and interpreted. (shrink)