Abstract
This paper deals with the truth conditions of conditional sentences. It focuses on a particular class of problematic examples for semantic theories for these sentences. I will argue that the examples show the need to refer to dynamic, in particular causal laws in an approach to their truth conditions. More particularly, I will claim that we need a causal notion of consequence. The proposal subsequently made uses a representation of causal dependencies as proposed in Pearl (2000) to formalize a causal notion of consequence. This notion inserted in premise semantics for counterfactuals in the style of Veltman (1976) and Kratzer (1979) will provide a new interpretation rule for conditionals. I will illustrate how this approach overcomes problems of previous proposals and end with some remarks on remaining questions.
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Acknowledgment
The author is supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Schulz, K. “If you’d wiggled A, then B would’ve changed”. Synthese 179, 239–251 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-010-9780-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-010-9780-9