The restrictor view, without covert modals

Abstract

The view that if-clauses function semantically as restrictors is widely regarded as the only candidate for a fully general account of conditionals. The standard implementation of this view assumes that, where no operator to be restricted is in sight, if-clauses restrict covert epistemic modals. Stipulating such modals, however, lacks independent motivation and leads to wrong empirical predictions. In this paper I provide a theory of conditionals on which if-clauses are uniformly interpreted as restrictors, but no covert modals are postulated. Epistemic if-clauses, like those in bare conditionals, restrict an information state parameter which is used to interpret an expressive layer of the language. I show that this theory yields an attractive account of bare and overtly modalized conditionals and solves various empirical problems for the standard view, while dispensing with its less plausible assumption.

Probabilities of conditionals: Updating Adams

“…This is only a sketch of how our Assumption 3 can be derived from a restrictor semantics, but hopefully sufficient to convey the idea. The task of developing a precise compositional semantics for a language involving if-clauses that can restrict, among other semantic parameters, an underlying information state, is to some extent independent of the present issues, and is taken up in a separate paper (Ciardelli, 2022). 26…”