Abstract
I propose that on some non-standard interpretations of conditionals, the antecedent influences not the truth-conditional, but the use-conditional evaluation of the consequent by restricting the modal base of a necessity operator introduced by the conditional form in the expressive dimension of utterance meaning. On this view, conditionals can be grouped into truth conditionals and use conditionals, depending on which interpretation is salient. I argue that such an analysis allows to predict properties of hypothetical conditionals, biscuit conditionals, and conditional hedges within a unified account.
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Notes
- 1.
Franke formulates the requirement not for \(\varPhi \) and \(\varPsi \) only, but for all \(X\in \{\varPhi ,\lnot \varPhi \}\) and all \(Y\in \{\varPsi ,\lnot \varPsi \}\); I show the part relevant for discussion of (2).
- 2.
To derive the biscuit conditional interpretation, Franke takes conditionals to convey a speaker belief that the antecedent entails the consequent, which, together with the assumption that the antecedent is possible and epistemic independence, allows for the conclusion that the speaker believes the consequent to be true. While this derives the biscuit conditional interpretation, it is incompatible with conditional hedges (see below), and assumes a different view of conditionals than this paper.
- 3.
The main concern of this paper are the compositional aspects of non-canonical conditionals, and there is not much space to discuss the nature of Relevance. See Sperber and Wison [18] for extensive discussion of issues around defining Relevance.
- 4.
In the paraphrases for the modal base, I will use “the speaker’s beliefs” to mean “the speaker’s beliefs regarding the relevant circumstances” for brevity.
- 5.
As mentioned, however, the examples will not contain any of the latter, and I remain agnostic in regard to the question of whether or not content of type \(t^c\) gets evaluated for felicity in terms of Gricean maxims.
- 6.
McCready’s assumption that u is of a resource-sensitive shunting type \(\textit{u}^s\), making an additional operation of assertion-to-content necessary to reintroduce at-issue meaning, is ignored here for ease of exposition.
- 7.
Note that I use the label “utterance meaning” to refer to the meaning of proposition used in a speech act, rather than just for the parts of its meaning of type \(u^c\).
- 8.
See Sect. 4.1 for discussion of the alternative idea that propositions in elements of type \(u^c\) are valuated like those of type \(t^c\), but with respect to speaker belief.
- 9.
On a side note, this is potentially an argument against making the modal base realistic, i.e. assuming a non-doxastic circumstantial modal base.
- 10.
This is possibly a simplification not in line with the relevant Gricean maxim of Quality, which bans assertion of propositions believed to be false, rather than requiring asserted propositions to be believed to be true.
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Rieser, L. (2017). Truth Conditionals and Use Conditionals: An Expressive Modal Analysis. In: Kurahashi, S., Ohta, Y., Arai, S., Satoh, K., Bekki, D. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10247. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61572-1_8
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