Conditionals: Inferentialism Explicated

Abstract

According to the view of conditionals named inferentialism, a conditional holds when its consequent can be inferred from its antecedent. This paper identifies some major challenges that inferentialism has to face, and uses them to assess three accounts of conditionals: one is the classical strict account, the other two have recently been proposed by Douven and Rott. As will be shown, none of the three proposals meets all challenges in a fully satisfactory way. We argue through novel formal results that a variation of the evidential account of conditionals suggested by Crupi and Iacona is the most promising candidate to develop inferentialism in a coherent formal framework.