Abstract
It is a common intuition that the antecedent of an indicative conditional should have something to do with its consequent, that they should be somehow connected. In fact, many conditionals sound unacceptable precisely because they seem to suggest a connection which is not there. Although the majority of semantic theories of conditionals treat this phenomenon as something pragmatic, for instance, something that is conversationally implicated, no one has offered a full-fledged pragmatic explanation of why missing-link, and, in particular, false-link conditionals strike us as odd. The aim of this paper is to explore the possibility that the link is an example of a conversational implicature. We discuss possible tests one can employ to identify conversational implicatures, and, ultimately, we show that the connection between a conditional’s antecedent and consequent fails them all.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank two referees whose comments helped to improve the manuscript substantially. This research is published within “The Logic of Conceivability” Project funded by the European Research Council (ERC CoG), Grant Number 681404.
References
Adams, Ernest W. 1975. The logic of conditionals. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.10.1007/978-94-015-7622-2Search in Google Scholar
Bach, Kent. 1999. The myth of conventional implicature. Linguistics and Philosophy 22. 327–366.10.1023/A:1005466020243Search in Google Scholar
Beaver, David I. & Bart Geurts. 2014. Presupposition. In Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition). Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/presupposition/ (accessed 1 December 2018).Search in Google Scholar
Bennett, Jonathan. 2003. A philosophical guide to conditionals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/0199258872.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Birner, Betty J. 2013. Introduction to pragmatics (Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics 24). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar
Blome-Tillmann, Michael. 2008. Conversational implicature and the cancellability test. Analysis 68(2). 156–160.10.1111/j.1467-8284.2007.00731.xSearch in Google Scholar
Declerck, Renaat & Susan Reed. 2001. Conditionals: A comprehensive empirical analysis. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110851748Search in Google Scholar
Douven, Igor. 2008. The evidential support theory of conditionals. Synthese 164(1). 19–44.10.1007/s11229-007-9214-5Search in Google Scholar
Douven, Igor. 2016. The epistemology of indicative conditionals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781316275962Search in Google Scholar
Douven, Igor. 2017. How to account for the oddness of missing-link conditionals. Synthese 194(5). 1541–1554.10.1007/s11229-015-0756-7Search in Google Scholar
Douven, Igor & Sara Verbrugge. 2012. Indicatives, concessives, and evidential support. Thinking & Reasoning 18(4). 480–499.10.1080/13546783.2012.716009Search in Google Scholar
Douven, Igor, Shira Elqayam, Henrik Singmann & Janneke van Wijnbergen-Huitink. 2018. Conditionals and inferential connections: A hypothetical inferential theory. Cognitive Psychology 101. 50–81.10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.09.002Search in Google Scholar
Edgington, Dorothy. 1995. On conditionals. Mind 104(414). 235–329.10.1093/mind/104.414.235Search in Google Scholar
Grice, Paul. 1989. Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Jackson, Frank. 1987. Conditionals. Oxford: Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar
Jaszczolt, Katarzyna M. 2005. Default semantics: Foundations of a compositional theory of acts of communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199261987.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Johnson-Laird, Philip N. & Ruth M. J. Byrne 2002. Conditionals: A theory of meaning, pragmatics, and inference. Psychological Review 109(4). 646–678.10.1037/0033-295X.109.4.646Search in Google Scholar
Krzyżanowska, Karolina. 2018. Deliberationally useless conditionals. Forthcoming in Episteme.10.1017/epi.2018.9Search in Google Scholar
Krzyżanowska, Karolina, Sylvia Wenmackers & Igor Douven. 2013. Inferential conditionals and evidentiality. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 22(3). 315–334.10.1007/s10849-013-9178-4Search in Google Scholar
Krzyżanowska, Karolina, Sylvia Wenmackers & Igor Douven. 2014. Rethinking Gibbard’s riverboat argument. Studia Logica 102(4). 771–792.10.1007/s11225-013-9507-2Search in Google Scholar
Lauer, Sven. 2013. Towards a dynamic pragmatics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University PhD dissertation.Search in Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalised conversational implicature. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.10.7551/mitpress/5526.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Lycan, William G. 2001. Real conditionals. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Search in Google Scholar
Over, David E., Constantinos Hadjichristidis, Jonathan St. B. T. Evans, Simon J. Handley & Steven A. Sloman. 2007. The probability of causal conditionals. Cognitive Psychology 54. 62–97.10.1016/j.cogpsych.2006.05.002Search in Google Scholar
Pagin, Peter & Francis Jeffrey Pelletier. 2007. Content, context and composition. In Gerhard Preyer and Georg Peter (eds.), Context-Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism: New Essays on Semantics and Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Recanati, François. 2010. Truth-conditional pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199226993.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Rostworowski, Wojciech, Natalia Pietrulewicz & Marcin Będkowski. 2016. Conditionals and content connection in the experimental perspective. Manuscript.Search in Google Scholar
Sadock, Jerrold M. 1978. On testing for conversational implicature. In Peter Cole (ed.), Syntax and Semantics: Pragmatics, 281–297. New York: Academic Press.10.1163/9789004368873_011Search in Google Scholar
Skovgaard-Olsen, Niels. 2016. Motivating the relevance approach to conditionals. Mind & Language 31(5). 555–579.10.1111/mila.12120Search in Google Scholar
Skovgaard-Olsen, Niels, Henrik Singmann & Karl Christoph Klauer. 2017. Relevance and reason relations. Cognitive Science 41(S5). 1202–1215.10.1111/cogs.12462Search in Google Scholar
Skovgaard-Olsen, Niels, Peter Collins, Karolina Krzyżanowska, Ulrike Hahn & Karl Christoph Klauer. 2019. Cancellation, negation, and rejection. Cognitive Psychology 108. 42–71.10.1016/j.cogpsych.2018.11.002Search in Google Scholar
Stalnaker, Robert C. 1968. A theory of conditionals. In Nicholas Rescher (ed.), Studies in Logical Theory (American Philosophical Quarterly Monograph Series 2), 98–112. Oxford: Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar
Unterhuber, Matthias. 2013. Possible worlds semantics for indicative and counterfactual conditionals? A formal philosophical inquiry into Chellas-Segerberg semantics. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag.10.1515/9783110323665Search in Google Scholar
van Rooij, Robert & Katrin Schulz. 2018. Conditionals, causality and conditional probability. Forthcoming in Journal of Logic, Language and Information.10.1007/s10849-018-9275-5Search in Google Scholar
Verbrugge, Sara. 2007. A psycholinguistic analysis of inferential conditional sentences. Leuven: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven PhD dissertation.Search in Google Scholar
Woods, Michael. 2003. Conditionals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
