Abstract
Reasoning with conditionals is central to everyday life, yet there is long-standing disagreement about the meaning of the conditional. One example is the puzzle of so-called missing-link conditionals such as "if raccoons have no wings, they cannot breathe under water." Their oddity may be taken to show that conditionals require a connection between antecedent ("raccoons have no wings") and consequent ("they cannot breathe under water"), yet most accounts of conditionals attribute the oddity to natural-language pragmatics. We present an experimental study disentangling the pragmatic requirement of discourse coherence from a stronger notion of connection: probabilistic relevance. Results indicate that mere discourse coherence is not enough to make conditionals assertable. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
Dokumententyp: | Zeitschriftenartikel |
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Fakultät: | Philosophie, Wissenschaftstheorie und Religionswissenschaft |
Themengebiete: | 100 Philosophie und Psychologie > 100 Philosophie |
ISSN: | 0010-0277 |
Sprache: | Englisch |
Dokumenten ID: | 53170 |
Datum der Veröffentlichung auf Open Access LMU: | 14. Jun. 2018, 09:52 |
Letzte Änderungen: | 04. Nov. 2020, 13:32 |