Abstract
In recent years, two new and fundamentally different accounts of conditionals and their logic have been put forth, one based on nearness of possible worlds (Stalnaker, ‘A Theory of Conditionals’, 1968, this volume, pp. 41–55; Lewis, Counterfactuals, 1973) and the other based on subjective conditional probabilities (Adams, The Logic of Conditionals, 1975). The two accounts, I shall claim, have almost nothing in common, They do have a common logic within the domain on which they both pronounce, but that, as far as I can discover, is little more than a coincidence. Each of these disparate accounts, though, has an important application to natural language, or so I shall argue. Roughly, Adams’ probabilistic account is true of indicative conditionals, and a nearness of possible worlds account is true of subjunctive conditionals. If that is so, the apparent similarity of these two ‘if constructions hides a profound semantical difference.
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Gibbard, A. (1980). Two Recent Theories of Conditionals. In: Harper, W.L., Stalnaker, R., Pearce, G. (eds) IFS. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9117-0_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9117-0_10
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