Between ``If'' and ``Then''

l BETWEEN“IF”AND“THEN” karolina krzyzanowska˙ Towards an Empirically Informed Philosophy of Conditionals © Karolina Krzyzanowska,˙ Groningen, 2015 Cover design by Nina Gierasimczuk. Printed by ?studio Michał Sławiński,thesisprint.eu. ISBN: 978-90-367-7515-1 ISBN: 978-90-367-7514-4 (printed version) Between “If” and “Then” Towards an Empirically Informed Philosophy of Conditionals PhD thesis to obtain the degree of PhD at the University of Groningen on the authority of the Rector Magnificus Prof. E. Sterken and in accordance with the decision by the College of Deans. This thesis will be defended in public on Monday 2 February 2015 at 14.30 hours by Karolina Helena Krzyżanowska born on 4 April 1985 in Żyrardów, Poland Supervisor Prof. I.E.J. Douven Assessment committee Prof. H. Rott Prof. D.E. Over Prof. L.C. Verbrugge CONTENTS 1 introduction1 1.1 Just another linguistic expression? 2 1.2 What is thought and how it is expressed 5 1.3 Towards an empirically informed philosophy 7 1.3.1 Outline of the thesis 8 2 what does a conditional mean? 9 2.1 Interlude: Conditionals and “ifs” 11 2.2 The ideal: a truth-functional account 14 2.3 In search of conditionality 33 2.4 What is wrong with the Ramsey Test? 45 3 towards a new semantics 49 3.1 Motivations 49 3.2 Between a conditional’s antecedent and its consequent 50 3.3 The new typology of conditionals 55 3.3.1 Douven and Verbrugge’s experiment 57 3.3.2 A note on content conditionals 60 3.4 Truth conditions 61 3.5 Limitations and merits 63 4 inferential conditionals and evidentiality 70 4.1 Evidential markers 70 4.1.1 Note on the methodology 76 4.2 Experiment 1. English markers 78 4.2.1 Method 78 4.2.2 Results and Discussion 79 4.3 Experiment 2. Dutch markers 82 4.3.1 Method 83 4.3.2 Results and Discussion 83 4.4 General discussion 86 5 rethinking gibbard’s riverboat argument 88 5.1 Conditional Non-Contradiction 88 5.2 Pragmatic ambiguity 91 5.3 A new solution 94 5.4 Deliberationally useless conditionals 98 5.4.1 The problem of bad advice 99 5.4.2 Backtracking in the context of deliberation 101 5.4.3 The source of unassertability 103 5.5 Experiment: Gibbard stories 104 5.5.1 Method 105 v contents vi 5.5.2 Results 108 5.5.3 Discussion 110 5.6 Conclusion 111 6 conclusion 112 6.1 Summary 112 6.2 Perspectives for future research 115 a appendix 119 b appendix 135 c appendix 150 bibliography 162 ACKNOWLEDGMENT Working on a dissertation is a long and difficult process. If not for the people who in various ways motivated, guided and supported me over the last couple of years, this work would have never come into existence. I am especially grateful to my supervisor, Igor Douven, for his guidance and patience, for always helpful comments and for the inspiring discussions. Thank you, Igor, for being there whenever I needed a piece of advice. I would also like to thank Sylvia Wenmackers for the fruitful collaboration on the experiments reported in this thesis. Over the years, many people have influenced the way I think about philosophical issues, inspired my interests and supported me in the process of developing my own ideas. For all the discussions on philosophy, cognitive science, language, and research in general, I would like to thank Timothy Broesamle, Jake Chand- ler, Richard Dietz, David Etlin, Nina Gierasimczuk, Jan Heylen, Piotr Ka´zmierczak, Franziska Köder, David Over, Truls Pedersen, Ben Rodenhäuser, Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson, Jakub Szymanik, Rineke Verbrugge, and Sander Verhaegh. I am particularly in- debted to David Etlin, Niels Skovgaard Olsen, Jakub Szymanik, Rineke Verbrugge and Janneke van Wijnbergen-Huitink for valuable feedback on some of the papers that served as the basis for this dissertation. Special thanks go to Nina and Jakub who have been a great source of encouragement and inspiration ever since we met in Karkonosze mountains, at the 2007 Logic and Cogni- tion Workshop. To Sander for being a wonderful office mate. To Franziska and to Timothy for their moral support when I needed it most. I would like to express my gratitude to the members and as- sociates of the Formal Epistemology Project at the University of Leuven, and to my colleagues, fellow students and friends from the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Groningen, and from the Department of Theoretical Philosophy especially, for cre- ating a friendly and stimulating research environment. In partic- ular, I would like to thank the Dean Lodi Nauta and the Vice- Dean Barteld Kooi as well as the current and the former lead- ers of the Theoretical Philosophy group, Jeanne Peijnenburg and Jan-Willem Romeijn. Additionally, I would like to thank Marga vii contents viii Hids, Anita Willems-Veenstra, and Hauke de Vries for their in- valuable help with countless practical matters. I am also grateful to Thomas Ågotnes for arranging my research stay at the Univer- sity of Bergen where I was able to complete this book. Last but not least, I am very grateful to my parents, Irmina and Andrzej, for their understanding and for all the books that sparked my interests in philosophy; and to Piotr, for everything I have learned from him and for his incredible, loving support. INTRODUCTION 1 Language is a powerful toolkit, full of sophisticated utensils allow- ing us to communicate almost anything we want, ranging from the most trivial of trivia to the greatest ideas a human mind can possibly construe. Regardless of whether we want to ask a house- mate to buy some milk or to explain advances in string theory to a group of specialists, language will usually provide the right tools for our purposes. Some of these tools are exceedingly simple while others are highly complex devices, yet we are using them all routinely and effectively, though typically without much understanding of their internal structure. Among those most complex and obscure linguistic devices, we find a class of sentences called conditionals, which are expressions (usually) of the form “If ', (then) ,” where ' and can be, in principle, any sentences. Conditionals have been an object of interest of philosophers, linguists, and psychologists for a few decades now, and this interest has kept growing over recent years. For someone outside this narrow field, this may strike as odd. Ul- timately, all those books and papers concern just one type of sen- tence, and quite a common one, too. We encounter them almost everywhere, ranging from newspaper articles, e.g.: (1) If the funds are not released within two weeks, the govern- ment risks being unable to pay wages and pensions. (The Economist.) through works of fiction: (2) If there are as many minds as there are men, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts. (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.) philosophical treatises: (3) If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.) to everyday conversations: (4) If Dorothy hears the news, she will be surprised. 1 1.1 just another linguistic expression? 2 (5) If your bike is not where you left it, someone must have stolen it. (6) If Clara had not made a complaint, someone else would have. Despite their prevalence, conditional sentences seem to belong to the most troublesome linguistic expressions. It is bewilderingly hard to come up with a non-trivial claim concerning conditionals that would not be subject to a contentious debate. Consequently, even the most fundamental questions regarding the semantics and pragmatics of conditionals are still awaiting a conclusive an- swer. There is no consensus among philosophers on what conditional sentences mean, what their truth conditions are, and whether or not they have truth conditions at all. Their assertabil- ity or acceptability conditions are not much less perplexing, not to mention the interpretation of conditionals whose antecedents or consequents are conditionals themselves. Regarding the problem of belief revision upon learning conditional information, philosophers have barely scratched the surface. Despite the fact that a tremendous amount of work devoted solely to conditional sentences has been published in the course of the last three or four decades, the available theories still fail to meet all of the theoretical objectives that have been formulated in the literature. We appear to have reached a point at which every theory faces a counterexample, every argument has its counter- argument, and every solution seems to give rise to an avalanche of new problems. One could even wonder if there is a point to further inquiry at all. But, of course, it is not customary for a philosopher to admit defeat. The inquiry must go on. However, it does not always have to continue along the same road, especially if the familiar road appears to be a blind alley. 1.1 just another linguistic expression? There are many reasons to believe that conditionals are special. To start with, it is not common for philosophers of language to question the very possibility for a whole class of sentences to have a truth value. Yet when it comes to conditionals, even this is con- troversial. Many researchers are convinced that conditionals do not have truth conditions, and, as a consequence, do not express propositions at all. But if that were true, which I am going to ar- gue that it is not, how are we to account for the fact that people 1.1 just another linguistic expression? 3 seem to mean something when they assert sentences of the form “If ', then ,” and frequently they mean it to be true? We seem to learn something from assertions of this form after all.

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