Conditional sentences are among the most intriguing and puzzling features of language, and analysis of their meaning and function has important implications for, and uses in, many areas of philosophy. Jonathan Bennett, one of the world's leading experts, distils many years' work and teaching into this Philosophical Guide to Conditionals, the fullest and most authoritative treatment of the subject. An ideal introduction for undergraduates with a philosophical grounding, it also offers a rich source of illumination and stimulation for graduate students (...) and professional philosophers. (shrink)

First published in 1952, professor’s Strawson’s highly influential _Introduction_ _to Logical Theory_ provides a detailed examination of the relationship between the behaviour of words in common language and the behaviour of symbols in a logical system. He seeks to explain both the exact nature of the discipline known as Formal Logic, and also to reveal something of the intricate logical structure of ordinary unformalised discourse.

In his new foreword to this edition, Hilary Putnam forcefully rejects these nativist claims.

Conditionals has at its center an extended essay on this problematic and much-debated subject in the philosophy of language and logic, which the widely respected Oxford philosopher Michael Woods had been preparing for publication at the time of his death in 1993. It appears here edited by his eminent colleague David Wiggins, and is accompanied by a commentary specially written by a leading expert on the topic, Dorothy Edgington. This masterly and original treatment of conditionals will demand the attention of (...) all philosophers working in this area. (shrink)

Over the last two decades, William Lycan’s work on the semantics of conditionals has been distinguished by his careful attention to the connection between syntax and semantics, and more generally by his impeccable methodology. Lycan takes compositionality seriously, so he requires that the meaning of compound expressions like ‘even if’ be a combination of the constituent expressions, here ‘even’ and ‘if’. After reading his work, it’s hard to take seriously work that does not share this methodology.

The aim of the paper is to draw a connection between a semantical theory of conditional statements and the theory of conditional probability. First, the probability calculus is interpreted as a semantics for truth functional logic. Absolute probabilities are treated as degrees of rational belief. Conditional probabilities are explicitly defined in terms of absolute probabilities in the familiar way. Second, the probability calculus is extended in order to provide an interpretation for counterfactual probabilities--conditional probabilities where the condition has zero probability. (...) Third, conditional propositions are introduced as propositions whose absolute probability is equal to the conditional probability of the consequent on the antecedent. An axiom system for this conditional connective is recovered from the probabilistic definition. Finally, the primary semantics for this axiom system, presented elsewhere, is related to the probabilistic interpretation. (shrink)

Woods argues that there is just one meaning of ‘if’ in all conditionals. Like Dudman, he thinks that the traditional division into “indicatives” and “subjunctives” is wrong; but unlike Dudman, he thinks that even a line drawn in the right place won’t distinguish two senses of ‘if’. Woods’s comprehensive account of conditionals has three main ingredients: the meaning of ‘if’, the meaning of ‘will’/‘would’, and the temporal significance of tense.

Counterfactuals is David Lewis' forceful presentation of and sustained argument for a particular view about propositions which express contrary to fact conditionals, including his famous defense of realism about possible worlds and his theory of laws of nature.

Suppose the world is chancy. The worry arises that most ordinary counterfactuals are false. This paper examines David Lewis' strategy for rescuing such counterfactuals, and argues that it is highly problematic.

This book develops in detail the simple idea that assertion is the expression of belief. In it the author puts forward a version of 'probabilistic semantics' which acknowledges that we are not perfectly rational, and which offers a significant advance in generality on theories of meaning couched in terms of truth conditions. It promises to challenge a number of entrenched and widespread views about the relations of language and mind. Part I presents a functionalist account of belief, worked through a (...) modified form of decision theory. In Part II the author generates a theory of meaning in terms of 'assertibility conditions', whereby to know the meaning of an assertion is to know the belief it expresses. (shrink)

This book contends that insufficient attention has been paid to the syntax of conditionals, as investigated by linguists.

'If' is one of the most important words in the English language, being used to express hypothetical thought. The use of conditional terms such as 'if' distinguishes human intelligence from that of all other animals. In this volume, Jonathan Evans and David Over present a new theoretical approach to understanding conditionals. The book draws on studies from the psychology of judgement and decision making, as well as philosophical logic.

Book synopsis: Philosophers have long been fascinated by the connection between cause and effect: are 'causes' things we can experience, or are they concepts provided by our minds? The study of causation goes back to Aristotle, but resurged with David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and is now one of the most important topics in metaphysics. Most of the recent work done in this area has attempted to place causation in a deterministic, scientific, worldview. But what about the unpredictable and chancey (...) world we actually live in: can one theory of causation cover all instances of cause and effect? (shrink)

Abstract In this paper I consider an easier-to-read and improved to a certain extent version of the causal chance-based analysis of counterfactuals that I proposed and argued for in my A Theory of Counterfactuals. Sections 2, 3 and 4 form Part I: In it, I survey the analysis of the core counterfactuals (in which, very roughly, the antecedent is compatible with history prior to it). In section 2 I go through the three main aspects of this analysis, which are the (...) following. First, it is a causal analysis, in that it requires that intermediate events to which the antecedent event is not a cause be preserved in the main truth-condition schema. Second, it highlights the central notion to the semantics of counterfactuals on the account presented here -- the notion of the counterfactual probability of a given counterfactual, which is the probability of the consequent given the following: the antecedent, the prior history, and the preserved intermediate events. Third, it considers the truth conditions for counterfactuals of this sort as consisting in this counterfactual probability being higher than a threshold. In section 3, I re-formulate the analysis of preservational counterfactuals in terms of the notion of being a cause, which ends up being quite compact. In section 4 I illustrate this analysis by showing how it handles two examples that have been considered puzzling – Morgenbesser's counterfactual and Edgington's counterfactual. Sections 5 and on constitute Part II: Its main initial thrust is provided in section 5, where I present the main lines of the extension of the theory from the core counterfactuals (analyzed in part I) to counterfactuals (roughly) whose antecedents are not compatible with their prior history. In this part II, I elaborate on counterfactuals that don't belong to the core, and more specifically on so-called reconstructional counterfactuals (as opposed to the preservational counterfactuals, which constitute the core counterfactual-type). The heart of the analysis is formulated in terms of processes leading to the antecedent (event/state), and more specifically in terms of processes likely to have led to the antecedent, a notion which is analyzed entirely in terms of chance. It covers so-called reconstructional counterfactuals as opposed to the core, so-called preservational counterfactuals, which are analyzed in sections 2 and 3 of part I. The counterfactual probability of such reconstructional counterfactuals is determined via the probability of possible processes leading to the antecedent weighed, primarily and roughly, by the conditional probability of the antecedent given such process: The counterfactual probability is thus, very roughly, a weighted sum for all processes most likely to have led to the antecedent, diverging at a fixed time. In section 6 I explain and elaborate further on the main points in section 5. In section 7 I illustrate the reconstructional analysis. I specify counterfactuals which are so-called process-pointers, since their consequent specifies stages in processes likely to have led to their antecedent. I argue that so-called backtracking counterfactuals are process-pointers counterfactuals, which fit into the reconstructional analysis, and do not call for a separate reading. I then illustrate cases where a speaker unwittingly employs a certain counterfactual while charitably construable as intending to assert (or ‘having in mind’) another. Here I also cover the issue of how to construe what one can take as back-tracking counterfactuals, or counterfactuals of the reconstructional sort, and more specifically, which divergence point they should be taken as alluding to (prior to which the history is held fixed). Some such cases also give rise to what one can take as a dual reading of a counterfactual between preservational and reconstructional readings. Such cases may yield an ambiguity, where in many cases one construal is dominant. In section 8 I illustrate the analysis by applying it to the famous Bizet-Verdi counterfactuals. This detailed analysis of counterfactuals (designed for the indeterministic case) has three main distinctive elements: its being chance-based, its causal aspect, and the use it makes of processes most likely to have led to the antecedent-event. This analysis is couched in a very different conceptual base from, and is an alternative account to, analyses in terms of the standard notion of closeness or distance of possible worlds, which is the main feature of the Stalnaker-Lewis-type analyses of counterfactuals. This notion of closeness or distance plays no role whatsoever in the analysis presented here. (This notion of closeness has been left open by Stalnaker, and to significant extent also by Lewis's second account.) . (shrink)