If a man buys a horse, … you have no argument against material implication: On a flaw in the foundations of the restrictor approach to conditionals (paper plus review plus comments on review)

If a man buys a horse, … you have no argument against material implication: On a flaw in the foundations of the restrictor approach to conditionals (paper plus review plus comments on review)
Carsten Breul
January 2021

The paper discusses a prominent one of Kratzer's (1986, 1991, 2012) arguments against material implication analyses of the denotation of (indicative) conditional sentences. This is the argument based on the sentence _Most of the time, if a man buys a horse, he pays cash for it_. It is shown that material implication makes a prediction that does conform to speakers' intuitions, contrary to Kratzer's claim. The paper also argues that Lewis's (1975) attack on material implication analyses of conditional sentences based on examples where the conditional is embedded under the adverbials _sometimes_ and _never_ does not have much force given that the interpretation of such sentences is subject to inferential pragmatic operations in addition to the recovery of their denotation. LingBuzz Version 2 is the version that has been accepted for publication by Linguistische Berichte. LingBuzz Version 1 consists of two parts: (1) a version of the paper that had been submitted to another peer reviewed journal and rejected on the basis of a review by an anonymous reviewer; (2) an appendix that contains this review and my comments on the points made in it.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005357 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Linguistische Berichte 269 (2022): 43-54. (lingbuzz/005357 is a pre-final version.)
keywords:	conditional sentence, restrictor approach, material implication approach
previous versions:	v1 [August 2020]
Downloaded:	576 times

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