From if to iff: Conditional perfection as pragmatic strengthening

Abstract

Geis and Zwicky's squib on “conditional perfection” (1971) released a hornet's nest of rebuttal and counter-rebuttal into the pragmatic atmosphere, with many scholars in the area playing alternately the roles of stinger and stingee. Geis and Zwicky's goal was to explain the notorious tendency among introductory logic students and ordinary speakers to ‘perfect’ an if-then conditional of the form of If you mow the lawn, I'll give you five dollars into the corresponding iff biconditional of the form if and only if you mow the lawn, I'll give you five dollars. In an overlapping pair of studies, van der Auwera (1997a,b) has recently contributed a comprehensive survey of the literature on conditional perfection before and since Geis and Zwicky as a microcosm of the development of post-Gricean pragmatic theory. While agreeing with van der Auwera on the centrality of the if → iff move for contemporary pragmatics, I will critique his treatment and offer my own perspective on the data and their ramifications, along with an expanded history that touches on the manifestations of conditional perfection and related inferential fallacies addressed in philosophical treatises, empirical psycholinguistic studies, and self-help primers. By extending the data base to include counterfactuals and other non-predictive conditionals, I will also present problems for Dancygier and Sweetser's (1997) alternative recent account of the CP phenomenon within the mental-spaces framework. The overall focus will be on the implications for the theory of conversational implicature, and in particular of R-based pragmatic strengthening, that can be drawn from the conditions on - and motivation for - conditional perfection.