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.
Item Type: | Journal article |
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Faculties: | Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Religious Science |
Subjects: | 100 Philosophy and Psychology > 100 Philosophy |
ISSN: | 0010-0277 |
Language: | English |
Item ID: | 53170 |
Date Deposited: | 14. Jun 2018, 09:52 |
Last Modified: | 04. Nov 2020, 13:32 |