Abstract
In previous publications, we have proposed a new, inferentialist semantics for indicative conditionals. According to this semantics, the truth of a conditional requires the existence of a compelling argument from the conditional’s antecedent together with contextually determined background premises to its consequent, where the antecedent is pivotal in the argument. In this paper, we recapitulate the position; report the progress we made over the past years, in particular highlighting the empirical support the position has garnered; and respond to criticisms that have been leveled at it.
The authors contributed equally to the paper and are listed alphabetically.
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Notes
- 1.
Roughly, indicative conditionals are sentences of the form “If A, B” whose main auxiliary is in the indicative mood. From here on, we mostly refer to them simply as “conditionals.”
- 2.
Below, we are more specific about what we mean by “normal conditionals.”
- 3.
It has been said that the claim that natural language conditionals are probability conditionals is intuitively supported by the fact that we sometimes report conditional probabilities—especially, objective conditional probabilities—using “if” instead of “given that” or “on the supposition that” (see van Fraassen 1976). Naturally, it does not follow from this (nor has anyone claimed otherwise) that conditional probabilities generally equal the probabilities of the corresponding conditionals.
- 4.
Notation slightly altered for uniformity of reading; comments in square brackets are ours.
- 5.
Cruz et al. (2016) may be interpreted as hinting at such a possibility.
- 6.
Krzyżanowska and colleagues operationalized the presence or absence of an inferential connection as probabilistic relevance. In general, this is problematic; see below.
- 7.
This argument was put forward by Grice (1989) in the context of a defense of the material account of conditionals, but see Krzyżanowska (2019) for a discussion of how it can be adapted to serve any theory of conditionals that validates and-to-if inferences and thus needs to deal with their counterintuitive consequences.
- 8.
See Sadock (1978) for a critical discussion of all these tests.
- 9.
Already Sadock (1978) argues that, while cancelability (and, also, reinforceabilty which Grice does not discuss) are necessary characteristics of implicatures, they are not sufficient to distinguish them from other pragmatic phenomena. Others have suggested that there are conversational implicatures that are not cancelable (e.g., Lauer 2013), though Zakkou (2018) argues that the cancelability test is reliable when restricted to non-figurative use of language.
- 10.
Implicatures cannot only be canceled, but also reinforced. For instance, “Some of my students passed the exam” can be followed up with “Not all of them did” and, even though the former utterance conversationally implicates the latter, that extra bit of information is not perceived as redundant or unnecessary, unlike attempts to reinforce semantic entailments. A recently published study by Rostworowski et al. (2021) shows that when a conditional “If A, B” is followed by a statement emphasizing that there is a causal, deductive, or abductive connection between A and B (e.g., “A will result in B” or “A entails B”), the latter is perceived as redundant. Moreover, Krzyżanowska (2019) argues that the connection does not pass any other test for conversational implicature put forward in the literature.
- 11.
Potts (2015), who does hold that there are conventional implicatures, points out that it is not entirely obvious which side of the semantics–pragmatics divide they belong to.
- 12.
Admittedly, the usefulness of this test has been questioned by Sadock (1978, pp. 287–290), who has argued that it requires presupposing what it is supposed to be a test for.
- 13.
Proponents of the suppositional theory might claim that (4) can be paraphrased by, “London will be flooded supposing that/assuming that/provided that global warming continues.” But note that these paraphrases would be equally infelicitous when there is no connection between the component clauses.
- 14.
Note that whether the at-issue versus not-at-issue distinction is determined by semantic or pragmatic considerations itself depends on how implicatures and presuppositions are defined (Potts 2015).
- 15.
That the latter can happen is demonstrated by the drivers license example from Douven (2012b).
- 16.
- 17.
Note that inferentialism is not the only way to cash out the idea of conditionality. As said in Douven (2016a, p. 36), to claim that there must be some kind of connection between a conditional’s antecedent and consequent leaves the nature of that connection wide open: “[I]t could be logical, statistical, causal, explanatory, metaphysical, epistemic; or the ‘connector’ could be a second-order functional property, notably, the property that there is some first-order property or other that links antecedent and consequent, much in the way in which some have argued that truth is a second-order functional property, instantiated by correspondence to the facts in some domains of discourse, by assertability or verifiability in other domains, and by yet some other first-order property in yet other domains.” Inferentialism is the substantive thesis that the nature of the “connector” is inferential.
- 18.
Confusion could arise on this point given that, for obvious reasons, we have always chosen examples of missing-link conditionals whose status as such is likely to be preserved under all reasonable changes of our background knowledge.
- 19.
We cannot think of a missing-link conditional whose component parts are not probabilistically independent of each other. That does not mean that whenever a conditional’s component parts are probabilistically independent of each other, that conditional is a missing-link conditional.
- 20.
This split was made strictly for control purposes.
- 21.
That is, in this case, conditionals that relative to any reasonable background premises will be perceived as lacking a connection between their component parts.
- 22.
The somewhat different approach to developing the logic of an inferentialist type of conditional taken by Berto and Özgün (2021) also appears promising to us.
- 23.
From the perspective of the classical computational theory of mind, the idea of a conditional logic makes a lot of sense. If the mind is, at bottom, a Turing machine, then there must be rules for manipulating expressions involving the conditional symbol. Uncovering those rules would yield the logic of conditionals. But in particular in light of the successes of connectionist approaches to the mind, the computational theory has lost much of its erstwhile appeal.
- 24.
In this connection, we would also like to refer to a remark specifically about counterfactuals that Over and Cruz make (p. x), to wit, that we can profitably study such conditionals “for some time” even if we cannot precisely define what counts as a counterfactual and what does not. One could go one step further and omit the “for some time”: even if we will never have a definition of the said kind, no one can deny that we know much more about counterfactuals now than we did fifty years back, and there is no reason to believe that any further progress can only be made by first finding a precise definition of counterfactuals. The decisive point is that we can identify clear instances of counterfactuals and also clear instances of conditionals that are not counterfactuals. If the class of counterfactuals remains vague around the edges, then that might hamper progress somewhat, but probably no more than vagueness does in many other areas of science that have nevertheless managed to report important successes. (Think of color science, which Clark 1993, p. vii, calls “the success story of scientific psychology so far,” but in which vagueness is rampant; see, e.g., Douven et al. 2017).
- 25.
- 26.
And really only a semantics. At this point, we have nothing to say about conditional threats or conditional promises, which are not the kind of things that can be true or false.
- 27.
The point is also missed in Mellor and Bradley (2021).
- 28.
We should also note that the first author has referred to the standard vs. non-standard distinction in publications long predating the time that we started working on inferentialism (see, e.g., Douven 2008). So the suggestion that the appeal to the distinction was ad hoc—not made in print but often in discussions—is demonstrably unfair.
- 29.
For an interesting discussion of what defines a conditional see also Elder and Jaszczolt (2016), whose starting point is an observation (based on the International Corpus of English-GB) of the disparity between the syntactic category of a conditional and the conditional meaning.
- 30.
Would it have falsified inferentialism? We are talking statistics here, so the old Popperian terminology is not very helpful. But it would have disconfirmed inferentialism, to an extent depending on how badly inferential strength would have failed to yield accurate predictions.
- 31.
This should also answer Over and Cruz’s question of why inferentialists have not produced an intuitive example of a true conditional with a true antecedent and a false consequent (Over and Cruz 2021, p. 18). It is a bit as if Over and Cruz were challenging someone who holds that there are things she was once firmly convinced of that are no longer among her beliefs simply because they slipped from her memory to give an example of such a thing.
- 32.
Skovgaard-Olsen et al. (2017) also miss this point.
- 33.
We find the term “falsifiable” rather puzzlingly Popperian and will instead refer to testability, and to evidence for or against the theory.
- 34.
We are greatly indebted to Paul Égré and Lance Rips for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Douven, I., Elqayam, S., Krzyżanowska, K. (2023). Inferentialism: A Manifesto. In: Kaufmann, S., Over, D.E., Sharma, G. (eds) Conditionals. Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05682-6_7
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