Context - sensitivity and ( indicative ) conditionals

Conditionals (in particular indicatives) give rise to stand-offs that have become well known from Gibbard’s initial Sly Pete example. The stand-offs can be seen as evidence for the context-sensitivity of (indicative) conditionals and arguably do not involve disagreement. I claim that the latter feature lends credibility to an indexical treatment of indicatives. 1. Conditionals in stand-off environments It has been pointed out that indicative conditionals give rise to standoffs along the following lines. A conditional of the form (a) If A then C may be judged as true, by a certain speaker, for her own communicative purposes, in circumstance of evaluation e, while at the same time a conditional of the form (b) If A then not-C may also be judged as true by another speaker in an equally legitimate way, in e. Assuming that no one would simultaneously condone two conditionals with the same antecedent and contradictory consequents, this means that the two speakers would have contradictory responses to each conditional. In particular, if someone accepts (a) she will deny (b) in the same context of utterance. Furthermore, no third party would have a reason to choose between the two conditionals, again because each of them seems to be asserted on equally legitimate grounds. This feature of indicative conditionals is illustrated by the well-known Sly Pete example (originally Gibbard’s) of which I now give an abridged 1 Work partially supported by the project Content, POCI/FIL/55562/2004 (FCT) at the Philosophy Centre of the University of Lisbon. 2 For the purposes of this paper, I assume that conditionals have truth-values (a view that is not popular with a few authors, notably D. Edgington and Gibbard). 3 Cf. Gibbard 1981: 226 ff.