The sentence ‘x is square’ might have had different truth conditions from those it in fact has. It might have had no truth conditions at all. Its having truth conditions and its having the ones it has rest on empirical facts about our use of ‘x is square’. What empirical facts? Any answer that goes into detail is inevitably highly controversial, but we think that there is a rough answer that is, by philosophers’ standards, relatively uncontroversial. It goes back to (...) Locke 1689 and beyond, and is best known to contemporary philosophers through the work of Grice 1957 and Lewis 1969. It is that we (usually implicitly) agreed, as a matter of contingent fact, to use ‘x is square’ as a way of conveying our taking it to be the case that x is square. (shrink)

The Ramseyan thesis that the probability of an indicative conditional is equal to the corresponding conditional probability of its consequent given its antecedent is both widely confirmed and subject to attested counterexamples (e.g., McGee 2000, Kaufmann 2004). This raises several puzzling questions. For instance, why are there interpretations of conditionals that violate this Ramseyan thesis in certain contexts, and why are they otherwise very rare? In this paper, I raise some challenges to Stefan Kaufmann's account of why the Ramseyan thesis (...) sometimes fails, and motivate my own theory. On my theory, the proposition expressed by an indicative conditional is partially determined by a background partition, and hence its probability depends on the choice of such a partition. I hold that this background partition is contextually determined, and in certain conditions is set by a salient question under discussion in the context. I show how the resulting theory offers compelling answers to the puzzling questions raised by failures of the Ramseyan thesis. (shrink)

This paper extends the defense of a simple theory of indicative conditionals previously proposed by the author, in which the truth conditions are material, and Grice-style assertability conditions are given to explain the paradoxes of material implication. The paper discusses various apparent counter-examples to the material account in which conditionals are not asserted, and so the original theory cannot be applied; it is argued that, nevertheless, the material theory can be defended.

In this paper I present some of Robert N. McLaughlin's critique of a truth functional approach to conditionals as it appears in his book On the Logic of Ordinary Conditionals. Based on his criticism I argue that the basic principles of logic together amount to epistemological and metaphysical implications that can only be accepted from a logical atomist perspective. Attempts to account for conditional relations within this philosophical framework will necessarily fail. I thus argue that it is not truth functionality (...) as such that is the problem, but the philosophical foundation of modern logic. (shrink)

This paper examines a neglected puzzle about conditionals: namely, the fact that each of a pair of conditionals with incompatible consequents, [A > C] and [B > C*], may be properly affirmable in circumstances when one does not believe, and is not entitled to infer, the denial of the conjunction of the antecedents, i.e. ~(A & B). The puzzle is why this should be so, since the conditionals entail the conjunction on the popular accounts of conditionals. I present a pragmatic (...) solution which distinguishes between two levels of affirmability. (shrink)