Abstract
Two key questions that have plagued philosophical and linguistic debates on the meanings of conditionals are: (i) do conditionals have truth conditions? And if so, (ii) what are these truth conditions? This chapter begins by revisiting familiar arguments against the material conditional as a psychologically plausible basis for the semantics of conditionals. It also defends the assumption that conditionals lend themselves to a truth-conditional treatment, thus rejecting the no-truth value account of conditionals, arguing against those views that combat the psychological plausibility of applying truth conditions to counterfactual conditionals. It then moves to current mainstream views on the semantics of conditionals, including the more philosophically-oriented Lewis-Stalnaker truth conditions using possible-worlds semantics, and the view most dominantly followed in linguistics, the ‘restrictor view’ from Kratzer. It settles on adopting Stalnakerian truth conditions for their flexibility in operating at different levels of representation, before finishing by reflecting on the scope of analysis of each of the main contenders.
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Notes
- 1.
Modus ponens is the logical inference following the argument form: p; if p then q; therefore q.
- 2.
Although much ink has been spilled on the logical properties of conjunction as well (although not quite as much as on those of conditionals).
- 3.
In fact, in 2018 England did experience the hottest summer on record.
- 4.
See Edgington (2014) for a detailed, accessible introduction to using probabilities with conditionals.
- 5.
There are many other labels for conditionals exhibiting the same phenomenon in the literature, including ‘monkey’s uncle’ conditionals, following the example ‘If that’s a real diamond then I’m a monkey’s uncle’, or the ‘Easter bunny conditional’: ‘If that’s a real diamond, then I’m the Easter bunny’.
- 6.
Lewis (1973) specifically equates the term ‘counterfactual’ with conditionals whose antecedents are false; he does not include conditionals in the subjunctive mood whose antecedents are assumed to be true in this class.
- 7.
Supervaluationism makes use of the concept of ‘valuations’: the assignment of truth values to sentences. If a sentence is true on all admissible valuations it is ‘supertrue’; likewise if a sentence is false on all admissible valuations it is ‘superfalse’.
- 8.
The problems of distinguishing logically equivalent sentences motivated develo** a more finely-grained notion of what the information content of a sentence is, resulting in Situation Semantics as an alternative to possible-worlds semantics. Interested readers are directed to Barwise and Perry (1983).
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
Very often, people don’t explicitly provide the ‘in view of’ information, and specifying the modal base is left to the work of context. We’ll come back to this imminently.
- 12.
Note that if bare conditionals restrict a covert modal, we must also expect those conditionals to be dependent on a modal restriction.
- 13.
See Elder and Jaszczolt (2016) on this point.
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Elder, CH. (2019). Conditional Sentences, Conditional Thoughts. In: Context, Cognition and Conditionals. Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13799-1_2
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