Connexivity and the Pragmatics of Conditionals
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Connexivity and the Pragmatics of Conditionals Andreas Kapsner1 Received: 15 August 2019 / Accepted: 8 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In this paper, I investigate whether the intuitions that make connexive logics seem plausible might lie in pragmatic phenomena, rather than the semantics of conditional statements. I conclude that pragmatics indeed underwrites these intuitions, at least for indicative statements. Whether this has any effect on logic choice (and what that effect might be), however, heavily depends on one’s semantic theory of conditionals and on how one chooses to logically treat pragmatic failures.
1 Introduction Connexive logic, as a research programme in philosophical logic, is motivated by powerful intuitions about the clear defectiveness of statements like If A is the case, then not- A is the case. I strongly believe that these intuitions must be accounted for in some way or other, even though they have been largely ignored, at least until recently. Those who have not ignored them have usually been trying to develop a semantic account of conditionals and negations that leads to a connexive logic, a move that requires considerable logical revision. In this paper, I will investigate whether this could maybe not be necessary, because the intuitions might be explained by pragmatic phenomena instead; in particular, I will be looking at the pragmatics of conditionals to answer this question. The question breaks up into two more specific ones that will lead us through the essay: Q-Pragmatic: Are there pragmatic principles that help explain our strong intuitions about statements like “If A is the case, then not- A is the case”? Q-Revision: Is this pragmatic explanation all there is to it, and will it thus lead to less drastic logical revision than what the connexive logicians call for, or maybe none at all?
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Andreas Kapsner [email protected] Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, 80539 Munich, Germany
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A. Kapsner
The outline of the paper is as follows: In a first part, I will introduce the principles of connexive logic and supply a first analysis of the intuitions that lie behind their plausibility. I will show that the intuitions are equally strong for indicative and counterfactual conditionals. The second part will discuss the pragmatic features of conditionals that might help explain those intuitions and present my answer to Q- Pragmatic: I will argue that such an explanation works for indicative conditionals, but not for counterfactuals. Lastly, a third part surveys the upshots for logic choice of such an explanation and thus supplies my answer to Q- Revision, this time a resounding “It depends”. Two remarks about what to expect: First, from a logical point of view the paper is quite programmatic in nature, in that it discusses rather general features of semantic and logical theories rather than particular systems. My aim is to get the goal into clearer focus, how to get there is beyond the sco
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