Conditionals and Inferential Connections: Toward a New Semantics

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Date
2019-06-22Abstract
In previous published research (“Conditionals and Inferential Connections: A Hypothetical
Inferential Theory,” Cognitive Psychology, 2018), we investigated experimentally what role the
presence and strength of an inferential connection between a conditional’s antecedent and
consequent plays in how people process that conditional. Our analysis showed the strength
of that connection to be strongly predictive of whether participants evaluated the conditional as true, false, or neither true nor false. In this paper, we re-analyze the data from our previous research, now focusing on the semantics of conditionals rather than on how they are processed. Specifically, we use those data to compare the main extant semantics with each other and with inferentialism, a semantics according to which the truth of a conditional requires the presence of an inferential connection between the conditional’s component parts.
Description
The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.
Citation : Douven, I., Elqayam, S., Singmann, H., & van Wijnbergen-Huitink, J. (2018). Conditionals and inferential connections: Toward a new semantic. Thinking & Reasoning, 101, pp.50–81.
Research Institute : Institute for Psychological Science
Peer Reviewed : Yes