This paper replies to Politzer’s (2007) criticisms of the mental model theory of conditionals. It argues that the theory provides a correct account of negation of conditionals, that it does not provide a truth-functional account of their meaning, though it predicts that certain interpretations of conditionals yield acceptable versions of the ‘paradoxes’ of material implication, and that it post...

Abstract The view that if -clauses function semantically as restrictors is widely regarded the only candidate for a fully general account of conditionals. standard implementation this assumes that, where no operator to be restricted in sight, restrict covert epistemic modals. Stipulating such modals, however, lacks independent motivation and leads wrong empirical predictions. In paper I provide...

Our understanding of subjunctive conditionals has been greatly enhanced through the use of possible world semantics and, more precisely, by the idea that they involve variably strict quantification over possible worlds. I propose to extend this treatment to ceteris paribus conditionals – that is, conditionals that incorporate a ceteris paribus or ‘other things being equal’ clause. Although such...

Conditionals are basic for human reasoning. In our paper, we present two experiments, which for the first time systematically compare how people reason about indicative conditionals (Experiment 1) and counterfactual conditionals (Experiment 2) in causal and non-causal task settings (N = 80). The main result of both experiments is that conditional probability is the dominant response pattern and...

This essay calls attention to a set of linguistic interactions between counterfactual conditionals, on one hand, and possibility modals like could have might have, the other. These data present challenge popular variably strict semantics for conditionals. Instead, they support version conditional in which counterfactuals share unified quantificational domain. I’ll argue that pragmatic explanati...

This paper explores the possibility of supplementing the suppositional view of indicative conditionals with a corresponding view of epistemic modals. The most striking feature of the suppositional view consists in its claim that indicative conditionals are to be evaluated by conditional probabilities. On the basis of a natural link between indicative conditionals and epistemic modals, a corresp...