The Projection Strategy and the Truth Conditions of Conditional Statements

Mind 98 (390):179-205 (1989)
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Abstract

Drawing on Stalnaker’s projection strategy, a revised version of the Ramsey test, and Dudman’s account of the evaluation of projective conditionals (e.g., “If Hitler invades England, Germany will win the war” and “If Hitler had invaded England, Germany would have won the war”), I offer a novel truth-conditional account of the semantics of a range of English conditionals. This account resolves some key puzzles in the philosophical literature about semantic differences between maximally similar conditionals of different types (including some parallel indicative and subjunctive conditionals) without assuming that the word “if” is ambiguous. It does so by explaining these semantic differences on the basis of semantic properties of the clauses combined by “if” and temporal factors arising from these properties.

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Michael Pendlebury
North Carolina State University

Citations of this work

Conditional predictions.Stefan Kaufmann - 2005 - Linguistics and Philosophy 28 (2):181 - 231.
Against Hypothetical Syllogism.Lee Walters - 2014 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 43 (5):979-997.
What if ? Questions about conditionals.Dorothy Edgington - 2003 - Mind and Language 18 (4):380–401.

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