Do Conditionals Have Truth Conditions?

Conditionals and Truth Functionality

Introduction The material interpretation of conditionals is commonly recognized as involving some paradoxical results. I here argue that the truth functional approach to natural language is the reason for the inadequacy of this material interpretation, since the truth or falsity of some pair of statements ‘p’ and ‘q’ cannot per se be decisive for the truth or falsity of a conditional relation ‘...

Conditionals in Theories of Truth

We argue that distinct conditionals—conditionals that are governed by different logics—are needed to formalize the rules of Truth Introduction and Truth Elimination. We show that revision theory, when enriched with the new conditionals, yields an attractive theory of truth. We go on to compare this theory with one recently proposed by Hartry Field.

Indicative Conditionals, Restricted Quantification, and Naive Truth

Do Indicative Conditionals Express Propositions?

In this paper I will focus on the question of what theoretical object we should use to represent the meaning of certain sentences. In particular, I will focus on the question of whether we should use propositions to represent the meaning of indicative conditionals. Before getting into this question I’ll try to locate it in the broader scheme of things. In recent years, the so-called semantic/pr...

Conditions for Backtracking with Counterfactual Conditionals

Counterfactual conditionals concern relations in other possible worlds. Most of these possible worlds refer to how a situation would have unfolded forward from a counterfactual assumption. In some cases, however, reasoning goes backward from the assumption, a phenomenon that is called backtracking. In the current study, we propose that people backtrack if and only if doing so will make a counte...