This paper presents a unified, more-or-less complete, and largely pragmatic theory of indicative conditionals as they occur in natural language, which is entirely truth-functional and does not involve probability. It includes material implication as a special—and the most important—case, but not as the only case. The theory of conditional elements, as we term it, treats if-statements analogously to the more familiar and less controversial other truth-functional compounds, such as conjunction and disjunction.

kind of joke to ask what is the case if the antecedent is false—“And where are the biscuits if I don’t want any?”, “And what’s on PBS if I’m not interested?”, “And who shot Kennedy if that’s not what I’m asking?”. With normal indicative conditionals like.

Content and, to a lesser degree, epistemic or inferential conditionals regularly invite conditional perfection as a non-monotonic inference or conversational implicature. Conditional perfection (henceforth CP) is the natural language tendency to perfect conditionals (if A then C) into their corresponding biconditionals (if and only if A, then C) through the mediation of an if not-A, then not-C conditional. In the literature there is some controversy regarding the pragmatic principle by which CP is derived, but there seems to be silent agreement (...) about the defeasibility of CP. In this paper we argue that the if not-A, then not-C CP inference is indefeasible with particular conditional utterance types where cancellation contrasts with the additional propositional attitude expressed by those conditional utterance types. The indefeasibility of the if not-A, then not-C CP inference can further be accounted for in terms of the pragmatic principle by which it is derived. (shrink)

This papers deals with examples offered by Adams, Austin and others which seem to show that `if' does not conform to all of the laws of the conditional. These a reconciled by treating them as conjunctions with embedded modalities.

We put forth a theory of conditional elements which can be used to dismiss apparent challenges to the truth-functionality of the conditional without apparent circularity. In the process, we refine the ideas of Yoes, published in an earlier paper in this journal, broadening and deepening them.

As the journal is effectively defunct, I am uploading a full-text copy, but only of my abstract and article, and some journal front matter. -/- Note that the pagination in the PDF version differs from the official pagination because A4 and 8.5" x 11" differ. -/- Traditionally, imperatives have been handled with deontic logics, not the logic of propositions which bear truth values. Yet, an imperative is issued by the speaker to cause (stay) actions which change the state of affairs, (...) which is, in turn, described by propositions that bear truth values. Thus, ultimately, imperatives affect truth values. In this paper, we put forward an idea that allows us to reason with imperatives using classical logic by constructing a one-to-one correspondence between imperatives and a particular class of declaratives. (shrink)