In Defence of a Contextualist Theory of Indicative Conditionals Gunnar

Indicative conditionals sometimes communicate that the consequent would follow causally or evidentially from the antecedent, and sometimes that it holds independently of the antecedent. On all standard accounts of indicatives, however, such relations of consequence and independence fall outside the content of conditionals. Instead, they are inferred pragmatically from the fact that a sentence with that content has been uttered. This paper argues that this standard view is deeply problematic, and develops and defends relational contextualism, a view according to which indicative conditionals lack a complete literal content from which contents involving specific causal or evidential consequence or independence relations are pragmatically derived. Such specific contents are indeed pragmatically determined, but when they are, they constitute the primary communicative content of particular indicative conditionals. It is explained how relational contextualism not only does straightforward justice to our everyday understanding of indicatives and gives an attractive view of how we interpret them, but also, crucially, how it avoids various difficulties for contextualist theories of conditionals.