Ifs, Ands, and Buts: An Incremental Truthmaker Semantics for Indicative Conditionals

Indicative conditionals appear to lie on a continuum, with the subjective and information-based on one side, and the objective and fact-based on the other. Attempts to bring them all under the same theoretical umbrella usually start at the subjective end; conditionals get more objective as they com...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Yablo, Stephen
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Format: Article
Published: Wiley-Blackwell 2018
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/115357
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9486-8323
Description
Summary:Indicative conditionals appear to lie on a continuum, with the subjective and information-based on one side, and the objective and fact-based on the other. Attempts to bring them all under the same theoretical umbrella usually start at the subjective end; conditionals get more objective as they come to be based in higher-quality, less parochial, information. I propose to go in the other direction, looking first for a class of “absolute” conditionals, then bringing in other conditionals by relaxing the constraints defining that class. (A plan of action is laid out at the end of section 4. The final footnote of each section sketches the contents of the next.)