Page 276 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Language and Logic
popular theory of conditionals. But it is not generally accepted. Not impressed by the examples cited above (which are due to Stalnaker), many logicians still believe that at least indicative conditionals can be properly interpreted as material or as strict impli- cations. For example, a defender of the idea that indicative conditionals are strict implications will argue that the oddity of the diesel oil example is easy to explain away using Grice's theory of conversation. (Roughly: It is a conversational implicature of the conclusion that the coffee may well contain diesel oil. But given this possibility, the premise is false. Hence, the argument in question is pragmatically unsound.) And not only pragmatic arguments are invoked; peo- ple resort to syntactic arguments, too. For instance, a defender of the material implication might argue that negations of whole conditional statements, being rare in English, have an idiosyncratic interpretation: it is not a real negation, but something weaker than that. Therefore, it is wrong to translate (1) with a formula of the form —\(p -»q).
3. Other Approaches
It is typical for the field of conditional logic that there is no consensus as to what form a semantic theory should take. The theories mentioned so far all supply truth conditions, and, according to the majority of logicians, who take the classical standard of logical validity—preservation of truth—as the starting point of their investigations, that is what a semantic theory should do. But according to the relevance logicians (see Anderson and Belnap 1975) truth preservation is at best a necessary condition for the logical validity of an argument, but it is by no means sufficient. The premises of the argument must in addition be relevant to the conclusion. According to Adams (1975) the proper explanation of validity is to be given in terms of probability rather than truth.
The epistemic turn in semantics during the early 1990s has given rise to yet another notion of validity. On the dynamic view, knowing the meaning of a sen-
tence is knowing the change it brings about in the information state of anyone who wants to incorporate the news conveyed by it. What matters is not so much what a sentence says about the world, but how it affects the information an agent has about the world.
1
Accordingly, attention has shifted from 'truth simpliciter to 'truth on the basis of the information available.'
As for conditionals, the main advantage of this approach is that more justice can be done to their highly context-dependent nature. They express con- straints on how information states can grow. By accepting an indicative conditional If p, then q, the possibility is excluded that one's information state may develop into a state in which p is true on the basis of the available information but q is false. Unlike purely descriptive sentences indicative conditionals are not 'stable' under growth of information: Ifp, then q may be false on the basis of limited information (simply because it is not yet possible to rule out the possibility that p will turn out true while q will turn out false), and become true when more information comes at hand. Many of the logical peculiarities of conditional sentences are directly related to this instability.
See also: Counterfactuals. Bibliography
Adams E 1975 The Logic of Conditionals. Reidel, Dordrecht Anderson A R, Belnap N D 197S Entailment. Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ
Edgington D 1995 On Conditionals. Mind 104: 235-329 Harper W L, Stalnaker R, Pearce, G (eds.) 1981 IPS: Con-
ditionals, Belief, Decision, Chance, and Time. Reidel, Dor-
drecht
Stalnaker R 1968 A theory of conditionals. In: Studies in
Logical Theory, American Philosophical Quarterly. Mono-
graph Series, 2. Basil Blackwell, Oxford
Traugott E C 1985 Conditional markers. In: Haiman J (ed.)
Iconicity in Syntax. Benjamins, Amsterdam
Traugott E C, Meulen A T, Reilly J, Ferguson C (eds.) 1986 On Conditionals. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Counterfactuals F. Veltman
Like most proverbs, the proverb 'If ifs and ans were been if only this or that had been the case. Still, the pots and pans, there would be no need for tinkers,' proverb does not do justice to our otherwise rather suggests a moral. Surely, when some practical complicated relation to the past. Sometimes it is decisions have to be made here and now, there is no appropriate to utter a sentence of the form If it had use in pondering how beautiful things would have been the case that then it would have been the case
254