Indicative conditionals

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Actual Situation ◽  
Indicative Conditionals ◽  
Counterfactual Conditionals ◽  
Correct Account ◽  
As If

Examples of indicative conditionals are ‘If it rained, then the match was cancelled’ and ‘If Alex plays, Carlton will win’. The contrast is with subjunctive or counterfactual conditionals, such as ‘If it had rained, then the match would have been cancelled’, and categoricals, such as ‘It will rain’. Despite the ease with which we use and understand indicative conditionals, the correct account of them has proved to be very difficult. Some say that ‘If it rained, the match was cancelled’ is equivalent to ‘Either it did not rain, or the match was cancelled’. Some say that the sentence asserts that the result of ‘adding’ the supposition that it rained to the actual situation is to give a situation in which the match was cancelled. Some say that to assert that if it rained then the match was cancelled is to make a commitment to inferring that the match was cancelled should one learn that it rained. This last view is often combined with the view that indicative conditionals are not, strictly speaking, true or false; rather, they are more or less assertible or acceptable.

Conditionals and Abduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 161-166
Author(s):  
Timothy Williamson
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
Indicative Conditionals ◽  
Cognitive Differences ◽  
Indicative Conditional ◽  
Counterfactual Conditional ◽  
Counterfactual Conditionals ◽  
The Past ◽  
Testing Of Hypotheses ◽  
New Evidence

The chapter gives a preliminary sketch of some cognitive differences between indicative conditionals and counterfactual conditionals relevant to the testing of hypotheses by experiment. They especially concern cases where the indicative conditional can be decided without new evidence while the counterfactual conditional cannot. They also show that the antecedent of a ‘counterfactual’ conditional need not be presupposed to be false. Differences connected with the past tense morphology of ‘would’ are explored. Cases are given where the morphology should be understood as expressing a ‘fake past’, modal rather than temporal.

Counterfactuals and Probability

2021 ◽  
pp. 100-121
Author(s):  
Robert Stalnaker
Keyword(s):  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Objective Probability ◽  
Indicative Conditionals ◽  
Conditional Belief ◽  
Subjunctive Conditionals ◽  
Counterfactual Conditionals ◽  
The World

Dorothy Edgington has been a resolute defender of an NTV account of conditionals, according to which a conditional does not express a proposition that makes a categorical claim about the world, but instead make a qualified claim, or express a conditional belief, qualified by or conditional on the proposition expressed by the antecedent. Unlike some philosophers who defend an NTV view for indicative conditionals, but not for subjunctive or counterfactual conditionals, Edgington argues for the more radical thesis that both kinds of conditionals should be given a non-propositional analysis. This chapter considers Edgington’s NTV account of subjunctive conditionals, the role of objective probability in the account, and its relation to the possible-worlds propositional analysis of subjunctive conditionals.

scholarly journals How children and adults keep track of real information when thinking counterfactually

PLoS ONE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (12) ◽  
pp. e0242967
Author(s):  
Jesica Gómez-Sánchez ◽  
José Antonio Ruiz-Ballesteros ◽  
Sergio Moreno-Ríos
Keyword(s):  
Counterfactual Thinking ◽  
Epistemic Status ◽  
Great Ability ◽  
Counterfactual Conditionals ◽  
The Third ◽  
Potential Sources ◽  
As If

Thinking about counterfactual conditionals such as “if she had not painted the sheet of paper, it would have been blank” requires us to consider what is conjectured (She did not paint and the sheet was blank) and what actually happened (She painted and the sheet was not blank). In two experiments with adults (Study 1) and schoolchildren from 7 to 13 years (Study 2), we tested three potential sources of difficulty with counterfactuals: inferring, distinguishing what is real vs conjectured (epistemic status) and comprehending linguistic conditional expressions (“if” vs “even if”). The results showed that neither adults nor schoolchildren had difficulty in the comprehension of counterfactual expressions such as “even if” with respect to “if then”. The ability to infer with both of these develops during school years, with adults showing great ability. However, the third source factor is critical: we found that the key to young children’s difficulty with counterfactual thinking was their inability to differentiate real and conjectured information, while adults showed little difficulty with this.

scholarly journals Presuppositions and Antipresuppositions in Conditionals

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Leahy
Keyword(s):  
Scalar Implicature ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
Indicative Conditionals ◽  
Subjunctive Conditionals ◽  
Counterfactual Conditionals ◽  
Issue Content

Utterances of counterfactual conditionals are typically attended by the information that their antecedents are false. But there is as yet no account of the source of this information that is both detailed and complete. This paper describes the problem of counterfactual antecedent falsity and argues that the problem can be addressed by appeal to an adequate account of the presuppositions of various competing conditional constructions. It argues that indicative conditionals presuppose that their antecedents are epistemically possible, while subjunctive conditionals bear no presupposition. Given this arrangement, utterance of the counterfactual results in an antipresupposition, that is, a scalar implicature generated from the presuppositions of competing alternatives rather than from the at-issue content of competing alternatives. The content of the antipresupposition is the negation of the presupposition of the competing indicative, i.e., that the antecedent of the conditional is known to be false by the speaker.

scholarly journals Presuppositions and Antipresuppositions in Conditionals

2015 ◽  
pp. 257
Author(s):  
Brian Leahy
Keyword(s):  
Scalar Implicature ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
Indicative Conditionals ◽  
Subjunctive Conditionals ◽  
Counterfactual Conditionals ◽  
Issue Content

Utterances of counterfactual conditionals are typically attended by the information that their antecedents are false. But there is as yet no account of the source of this information that is both detailed and complete. This paper describes the problem of counterfactual antecedent falsity and argues that the problem can be addressed by appeal to an adequate account of the presuppositions of various competing conditional constructions. It argues that indicative conditionals presuppose that their antecedents are epistemically possible, while subjunctive conditionals bear no presupposition. Given this arrangement, utterance of the counterfactual results in an antipresupposition, that is, a scalar implicature generated from the presuppositions of competing alternatives rather than from the at-issue content of competing alternatives. The content of the antipresupposition is the negation of the presupposition of the competing indicative, i.e., that the antecedent of the conditional is known to be false by the speaker.

scholarly journals Three paradoxes and a reasonable inference

2016 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-25
Author(s):  
Vladan Djordjevic
Keyword(s):  
Indicative Conditionals ◽  
Counterfactual Conditionals ◽  
The Third ◽  
Famous Paper ◽  
Reasonable Inference

In a previous paper of mine I offered solutions to three paradoxes, two of which were solved in Stalnaker?s famous paper ?Indicative Conditionals? in terms of his distinction between valid and reasonable inference. In a sense my solutions to the two paradoxes are very similar. In this paper I explain why, despite the similarity, I looked for a different solution and new distinctions. After explaining the similarity, I argue that my distinctions point to a more basic phenomenon, which I try to show by applying the distinctions to problems that cannot be solved in terms of Stalnaker?s distinction. The third paradox is one such problem. Beside that, each of the paradoxes, originally formulated in terms of indicative conditionals, can be formulated in terms of counterfactual conditionals. I solve these cases in exactly the same way, while Stalnaker?s distinction is not applicable to them.

Improvement of an artificial test substrate technique for evaluation of em immunocytochemical labeling

1987 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 762-763
Author(s):  
G. D. Gagne ◽  
M. F. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Bovine Serum Albumin ◽  
Serum Albumin ◽  
Bovine Serum ◽  
Artificial Substrate ◽  
Chemical Fixation ◽  
As If

We recently described an artificial substrate system which could be used to optimize labeling parameters in EM immunocytochemistry (ICC). The system utilizes blocks of glutaraldehyde polymerized bovine serum albumin (BSA) into which an antigen is incorporated by a soaking procedure. The resulting antigen impregnated blocks can then be fixed and embedded as if they are pieces of tissue and the effects of fixation, embedding and other parameters on the ability of incorporated antigen to be immunocyto-chemically labeled can then be assessed. In developing this system further, we discovered that the BSA substrate can also be dried and then sectioned for immunolabeling with or without prior chemical fixation and without exposing the antigen to embedding reagents. The effects of fixation and embedding protocols can thus be evaluated separately.

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