What Would You Have Done If... ?

Isard, Stephen

doi:10.1515/thli.1974.1.1-3.233

Cited by 33 publications

(19 citation statements)

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“…Conditionals based on past possibilities, such as Example 4, are usually called counterfactual conditionals, and they have attracted attention in philosophy (e.g., Jackson, 1991;Lewis, 1973;Stalnaker, 1968) and linguistics (e.g., Dudman, 1988;Isard, 1974), as well as artificial intelligence (e.g., Ginsberg, 1986) and psychology (e.g., Johnson-Laird, 1986;Kahneman & Miller, 1986). Conditionals based on present possibilities, such as Example 2, which we will call nonfactual conditionals, have attracted less attention, but our points apply equally to both counterfactual and nonfactual conditionals.…”

Section: Iflinda Had Been In Dublin Then Cathy Would Have Been Inmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deductive reasoning with factual, possible, and counterfactual conditionals

1999

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We compared reasoners' inferences from conditionals based on possibilities in the present or the past (e.g., "If Linda had been in Dublin then Cathy would have been in Galway") with their inferences based on facts in the present or the past (e.g., "If Linda was in Dublin then Cathy was in Galway"). We propose that people construct a richer representation of conditionals that deal with possibilities rather than facts: Their models make explicit not only the suppositional case, in which Linda is in Dublin and Cathy is in Galway, but also the presupposed case, in which Linda is not in Dublin and Cathy is not in Galway.Wereport the results offour experiments that corroborate this model theory. The experiments show that reasoners make more inferences from conditionals based on possibilities rather than on facts when the inferences depend on the presupposed case. The results also show that reasoners generate different situations to verify and falsify conditionals based on possibilities and facts.Everyday reasoning is concerned not just with inferences about facts but also with inferences about possibilities. Our aim in this paper is to develop and test a psychological theory of reasoning with conditionals based not only on facts but also on possibilities. We will examine conditionals that deal with current facts, such as IfLinda is in Dublin then Cathy is in Galway.(l) and we will compare them with conditionals that deal with non factual or hypothetical states of affairs such as present possibilities (that could happen given the actual state of the world), such as IfLinda were in Dublin then Cathy would be in Galway. (2)We will also examine conditionals that deal with past facts, such as IfLinda was in Dublin then Cathy was in Galway. (3)We thank Vittorio Girotto, Simon Handley, Phil Johnson-Laird, Mark Keane, Mac MacLachlan, Alberto Mazzocco, David O'Brien, Shane O'Mara, David Over, and Valerie Thompson for their helpful comments on the research. We are grateful to Rachel McCloy for collecting and analyzing the data for the second experiment, and to the Dublin University Arts and Social Sciences Benefactions fund for support to do so. The results of some of the experiments were reported at various conferences, including the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society in Atlanta in 1994 and the Fifth International Colloquium on Cognitive Science in San Sebastian, Spain, in 1997. Correspondence should be addressed to R. M. 1. Byrne , Jackson, 1991; Lewis, 1973;Stalnaker, 1968) and linguistics (e.g., Dudman, 1988;Isard, 1974), as well as artificial intelligence (e.g., Ginsberg, 1986) and psychology (e.g., Johnson-Laird, 1986;Kahneman & Miller, 1986). Conditionals based on present possibilities, such as Example 2, which we will call nonfactual conditionals, have attracted less attention, but our points apply equally to both counterfactual and nonfactual conditionals.Early psychological interest in counterfactual conditionals focused on aspects of memory and comprehension (e.g., Carpenter, 1973;Fillenbau...

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Section: Iflinda Had Been In Dublin Then Cathy Would Have Been Inmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deductive reasoning with factual, possible, and counterfactual conditionals

1999

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“…(a) subjunctive antecedents contain a modal operator (Isard 1974;Lyons 1977;Iatridou 2000;Schulz 2007: Ch.6) 39 Like von Fintel's theory, the apparatus here also allows one to explain the intuitive validity of many cases of transitivity as well as the asymmetries those inferences exhibit, but that too must be reserved for another occasion.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Past tense morphology serves a purely temporal function in indicative antecedents, and so indicative antecedents remain concerned with the live contextual possibilities. (Isard 1974;Lyons 1977;Iatridou 2000) The basic idea is that these three observations are nicely explained by assuming a modal interpretation of past tense morphology in the antecedents of subjunctives gives rise to Stalnaker's Distinction. Any account of how subjunctive conditionals are put together must account for the fact that past tense morphology does not receive its normal temporal interpretation in subjunctive conditionals, but does in the antecedents of indicatives.…”

Section: The Ingredients Of a Subjunctive Antecedentmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Uniform Theory of Conditionals

Starr

2013

J Philos Logic

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A uniform theory of conditionals is one which compositionally captures the behavior of both indicative and subjunctive conditionals without positing ambiguities. This paper raises new problems for the closest thing to a uniform analysis in the literature (Stalnaker 1975) and develops a new theory which solves them. I also show that this new analysis provides an improved treatment of three much-discussed phenomena (the import-export equivalence, reverse Sobel-sequences and disjunctive antecedents). While these results concern central issues in the study of conditionals, broader themes in the philosophy of language and formal semantics are also engaged here. This new analysis exploits a dynamic conception of meaning where the meaning of a symbol is its potential to change an agent's mental state (or the state of a conversation) rather than being the symbol's content (e.g. the proposition it expresses). The analysis of conditionals is also built on the idea that the contrast between subjunctive and indicative conditionals parallels a contrast between revising and consistently extending some body of information.

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“…It is a familiar slogan that counterfactuals may pertain to possibilities that are incompatible with the common ground (see Stalnaker 1975) and that this is so in virtue of their carrying a past tense morphology that receives a modal instead of its usual temporal interpretation (see Iatridou 2000, Isard 1974, Lyons 1977, and Starr 2014a. 18 The obvious move to make then is to embellish each set of possible worlds with a counterfactual domain of quantification that may evolve dynamically as discourse proceeds and then model counterfactuals in terms of their update effects on such domains.…”

Section: Counterfactualsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lessons from Sobel sequences

Willer

2017

Semantics and Pragmatics

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What Would You Have Done If... ?

Cited by 33 publications

References 0 publications

Deductive reasoning with factual, possible, and counterfactual conditionals

Deductive reasoning with factual, possible, and counterfactual conditionals

A Uniform Theory of Conditionals

Lessons from Sobel sequences

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