On Stalnaker’s “Indicative Conditionals”

Abstract

Stalnaker’s “Indicative conditionals” is not primarily about conditionals. Its main goal is to showcase the power of a general-purpose theoretical framework and not to solve isolated puzzles in conditional semantics. The aim of the present paper is to introduce the central cogs, the main innovations and the general significance of that framework. My focus throughout is on unpacking Stalnaker’s views and working through some of the unfinished agenda of “Indicative conditionals”. I start out by developing the paper’s central puzzle focusing on the direct argument (the inference from she ate apples or pears to if she didn’t eat apples, she ate pears). Stalnaker’s solution is to invalidate the direct argument, but recover its plausibility by classifying it as a reasonable inference. As part of my expansion on Stalnaker’s discussion, I explore Stalnaker’s definition of reasonable inference, the logical properties of the relation, and its relation to the related concept of Strawson entailment. Following this analogy, I highlight the little emphasized fact that reasonable inference is intransitive. I conclude by discussing Stalnaker’s application of the apparatus of this paper to a purported argument for fatalism.KeywordsConditionalsEntailmentPragmaticsSelection SemanticsTransitivity