Conditionals from a linguistic point of view: Two case studies

The meaning of conditional sentences bears an intrinsic relation to a number of central philosophical problems, like the nature of reasoning, the possibility of knowledge, and the status of laws of nature. This has incited philosophers to spend a lot of time working on conditionals and to fill countless bookshelves with inspiring and sophisticated theories on their meaning. However, the overall question of how to approach the meaning of conditionals is still open. There are many different theories on the market, many central issues still need to be solved. But as a topic philosophers are interested in conditionals are special in that they are real; they can be the subject of empirical investigations. And they are actually investigated – in linguistic, in psychology, in the cognitive sciences. The goal of this paper is to illustrate how this ‘external’ information can be used to answer questions on the semantics of conditional sentences that philosophers and logicians are interested in. The focus will lie here on using linguistics information. In order to make this point we will concentrate on two open problems in the field. The first problem is the relation between the logical form often assumed for conditional sentence and the actual form of these sentences. We will argue based on linguistic observations that the expression A > C standardly used in the philosophical literature to formalize conditionals is not appropriate and discuss an alternative, analyzing the antecedent as a referential expression. The second case discussed here is the distinction between indicative and subjunctive conditionals. The standard view in the philosophical literature is that indicative and subjunctive conditionals are two essentially different types of conditionals. We will argue, starting from how the distinction between indicative and subjunctive conditionals is normally marked, that there is only one conditional. The observed differences in meaning will be explained assuming different presuppositions for both types of clauses.