Curious Legal Conditionals

Defeasible reasoning with legal conditionals.

Valid conclusions can be defeated if people can think of conditions that prevent the consequent to occur although the antecedent is given. The goal of the present research was to investigate how people consider these conditions when reasoning with legal conditionals such as "If a person kills another human, then this person should be punished for manslaughter." In Experiments 1 and 2 legal cond...

Conditionals and Pseudo-Conditionals in Mathematical Texts

Conditionals are the basic ingredient of a mathematical argument. We present an analysis of conditionals and pseudo-conditional in mathematical discourse, and then propose a computational framework for the (re-)construction and semantic representation of conditional dependencies.

Chinese Conditionals and the Theory of Conditionals*

As is well known, in conditionals and, more generally, in structures involving adverbs of quantification, indefinite NPs like a cat display a variable quantificational force. Within DRT this phenomenon is analyzed by assimilating indefinites to variables. Unlike other variable-like elements, however, indefinites cannot be anaphoric to some thing else. That is, one cannot say things like "a cat ...

Classifying Conditionals

Chimerical conditionals

This paper introduces and analyzes chimerical conditionals, a class of conditionals that are ambiguous between so called ‘biscuit’ and hypothetical conditional readings. First, an analysis of the biscuit / hypothetical distinction is developed which draws on the pragmatic account of Franke (2009) and pins the distinction on the presence of a special kind of pragmatic presupposition, where what ...