Decomposing relevance in conditionals

A relevance - theoret ic account of metarepresentative uses in conditionals *

The purpose of this paper is to give a relevance-theoretic account of certain 'non-basic' indicative conditionals. There has been a claim (e.g. Grice 1989) that natural language if is semantically identical with material implication in logic. This approach runs into some problems, one of which is that some natural-language conditionals do not appear to involve the required truth-functional rela...

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 ...

Conditionals in reasoning

The paper presents a non-monotonic inference relation on a language containing a conditional that satisfies the Ramsey Test. The logic is a weakening of classical logic and preserves many of the ‘paradoxes of implication’ associated with the material implication. It is argued, however, that once one makes the proper distinction between supposing that something is the case and accepting that it ...

Tense in Simple Conditionals