Ching Hui SU
Shandong University
At the current stage of the development of conditionals, in both philosophy and logic, divergences remain unsettled. Various accounts have been proposed, ranging from strict implication (C. I. Lewis, 1912) and conditional probability (E. Adams, 1965) to variably strict conditionals (R. Stalnaker, 1968; D. Lewis, 1973), premise semantics (A. Kratzer, 1977), and interventionism (D. Galles and J. Pearl, 1998). However, none have silenced the others. The present paper aims to provide a promising account that can supersede the others. We treat conditionals as question-answer pairs (or issue-resolution pairs), where the antecedent (taken as a salient supposition of the speaker) and background knowledge are used to pose a question (issue) to the hearer, with the consequent providing the speaker’s answer (resolution). We demonstrate that this approach is more general in its ability to express the connections between the antecedents and consequents than many other approaches. Furthermore, this approach can explain (at least) two puzzles surrounding conditionals: Inconsistent Consequents pairs and Missing Link Conditionals. Our approach provides a straightforward solution: when the question raised by some IC pairs is a polar question, the law of conditional excluded middle is taken as true. However, when the question raised by other IC pairs is a wh-question, the intuition to accept multiple answers comes from the fact that wh-questions allow for this. Regarding the missing link conditionals, we conclude that either the answer provided by the consequent is not a qualified answer to the speaker’s question (e.g., “1 + 1 = 2” is not an adequate response to “who is going to the party?”), or the supposition offered by the antecedent plays no part in determining the truth value of the conditional (e.g. the fact that raccoons have no wing is irrelevant to whether they can breathe under water or not). Finally, we explore an issue concerning the ambiguity of conditional sentences.
