The Meaning of If

Abstract

Conditional sentences remain a puzzling source of philosophical speculation in large part because there seems to be nothing they could possibly mean that would vindicate the roles they play in language and thought. Bringing together work from philosophy and linguistics, Justin Khoo articulates a theory of what conditionals mean that captures their varied and complex behavior. According to the theory, conditionals form a unified class of expressions that share a common semantic core that encodes inferential dispositions. Thus, rather than represent the world, conditionals are devices used to communicate how we are disposed to infer. Khoo shows that this core theory can be extended to predict the correct probabilities of conditionals, as well as the semantic and pragmatic between different kinds of conditionals. The resulting theory has broad implications beyond debates about the meaning of conditionals, including upshots about the nature of metaphysical and epistemic possibility, the cognitive roles of non-factual contents, and the relationship between counterfactuals and causation.