Conditionals in English and FOPL

In the 1960’s, both Montague (e.g. 1970, 222) and Grice (1975, 24) famously declared that natural languages were not as different from the formal languages of logic as people had thought. Montague sought to comprehend the grammars of both within a single theory, and Grice sought to explain away apparent divergences as due to the fact that natural languages, but not the languages of logic, were used for conversation. But, if we confine our concept of logic to first order predicate logic (or FOPL) with identity (that is, omitting everything which is not required for the pursuit of mathematical truth), then there are of course many other aspects, in addition to its use in conversation, which distinguish natural language from logic. Conventional implicature, information structure (including presupposition), tense and time reference, and the expression of causation and inference are several of these, which combine as well with syntactic complexities which are unnecessary in first order predicate logic. In this paper I will argue that such distinguishing aspects should be more fully exploited to explain the differences between the material conditional of logic and the indicative conditional of one natural language (English). In the first section of the paper we will review the main contending analyses of the English indicative conditional. In section 2 I will try to argue there that, as far as truth conditions go, there is some support for the much maligned material conditional view. (Much of this material is taken from Abbott 2004.) Following that we will look in more detail at some of the traditionally cited problems for the material conditional analysis. Here I will try to draw on the differences between natural language and logic mentioned above in order to argue that these problems are not as crushing as they are sometimes taken to be. The last section of the paper contains concluding remarks.