Laws for biscuits: Independence and dependence in conditionals

Abstract

Pragmatic theories of biscuit conditionals (BCs) claim that BCs have a standard conditional semantics and that the defining characteristics is a contextual assumption of independence. Intuitively there is no connection between antecedent and consequent. I argue that the standard formalization of independence is insuf- ficient. This is shown with the phenomenon of factual uses of conditionals where the antecedent is mutually accepted by discourse participants. The standard account is amended with a framework which represents dependencies between facts and ‘grounds’ the standard formalization in the independence of facts.