Motivating the Relevance Approach to Conditionals

Skovgaard-Olsen, Niels

doi:10.1111/mila.12120

Cited by 23 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…A guiding idea of this tradition is that it constitutes a semantic defect when the antecedent of a conditional is irrelevant to the consequent, as in Edgington's (, p. 267) example: “If Napoleon is dead, Oxford is in England.” In contrast, other accounts will have to set such infelicities aside as pragmatic phenomena that arise due to violations of Gricean norms of informative conversations. Yet, as Skovgaard‐Olsen (forthcoming) argues, such an explanation suffers from the problem that these conditionals lack a standard interpretation, which can be decoded by a minimum of contextual information, whereby they would come out as felicitous even when dealing with individual reasoning. Hence, as they are both defective w.r.t.…”

Section: Ranking Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, Spohn () lists other candidates for analysis through his account of reason relations such as “although,” ”despite,” and ”because.” Accordingly, “ C although A ” roughly expresses that C was not to be expected, given A , “ C despite A ” likewise expresses negative relevance, and “ C because A ,” inter alia , expresses that C was bound to obtain, given A . Finally, this list has been extended to cover about 30 further utterance modifiers such as “however” and “be that as it may” in Skovgaard‐Olsen (forthcoming).…”

Section: Ranking Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ranking Theory and Conditional Reasoning

Skovgaard-Olsen

2015

Cognitive Science

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Ranking theory is a formal epistemology that has been developed in over 600 pages in Spohn's recent book The Laws of Belief, which aims to provide a normative account of the dynamics of beliefs that presents an alternative to current probabilistic approaches. It has long been received in the AI community, but it has not yet found application in experimental psychology. The purpose of this paper is to derive clear, quantitative predictions by exploiting a parallel between ranking theory and a statistical model called logistic regression. This approach is illustrated by the development of a model for the conditional inference task using Spohn's (2013) ranking theoretic approach to conditionals.

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Section: Ranking Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Ranking Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Ranking Theory and Conditional Reasoning

Skovgaard-Olsen

2015

Cognitive Science

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“…Already contingency accounts for conditionals like (1) (cf. Douven 2008;Skovgaard-Olsen 2016;Skovgaard-Olsen et al 2016). If antecedent and consequent are probabilistically independent, we get DP A C ¼ PðCjAÞ À PðCj:…”

Section: Application 1: the Missing Link Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conditionals As Representative Inferences

Rooij

Schulz

2020

Axiomathes

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According to Adams (Inquiry 8:166-197, 1965), the acceptability of an indicative conditional goes with the conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent. However, some conditionals seem to be inappropriate, although their corresponding conditional probability is high. These are cases with a missing link between antecedent and consequent. Other conditionals are appropriate even though the conditional probability is low. Finally, we have the so-called biscuit conditionals. In this paper we will generalize analyses of Douven (Synthese 164:19-44, 2008) and others to account for the appropriateness of conditionals in terms of evidential support. Our generalization involves making use of Value, or intensity. We will show how this generalization helps to account for biscuit conditionals and conditional threats and promises. Finally, a link is established between this analysis of conditionals and an analysis of generic sentences.

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“…One way to account for the oddity of false-link conditionals is to demand the presence of, e.g., an inferential or causal relation between antecedents and consequents for conditionals to be true or acceptable (e.g., Douven 2008;Krzyżanowska et al 2014;Skovgaard-Olsen 2016;Douven et al 2018;van Rooij and Schulz 2018). The connection is then understood as a part of what is said -a conventional, or even truth-conditional content of a conditional, hence sentences such as (1) come out as unacceptable or false.…”

Section: Odd Conditionalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What is wrong with false-link conditionals?

Krzyżanowska

2019

Linguistics Vanguard

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It is a common intuition that the antecedent of an indicative conditional should have something to do with its consequent, that they should be somehow connected. In fact, many conditionals sound unacceptable precisely because they seem to suggest a connection which is not there. Although the majority of semantic theories of conditionals treat this phenomenon as something pragmatic, for instance, something that is conversationally implicated, no one has offered a full-fledged pragmatic explanation of why missing-link, and, in particular, false-link conditionals strike us as odd. The aim of this paper is to explore the possibility that the link is an example of a conversational implicature. We discuss possible tests one can employ to identify conversational implicatures, and, ultimately, we show that the connection between a conditional’s antecedent and consequent fails them all.

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Motivating the Relevance Approach to Conditionals

Cited by 23 publications

References 37 publications

Ranking Theory and Conditional Reasoning

Ranking Theory and Conditional Reasoning

Conditionals As Representative Inferences

What is wrong with false-link conditionals?

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