Problems with Gauker's Conditional Semantics

Abstract

A significant amount of research has been dedicated to reconciling paradoxes that arise when English conditionals (“If P, then Q”) are interpreted as bearing the same semantic relation as material implication in first order logic. For example, the statement “if it rained yesterday, then it didn’t rain hard”, by the rule of contraposition, should be logically equivalent to “if it rained hard yesterday, then it didn’t rain”. Clearly, this would be a false utterance in English. Paradoxes similar to these have led a number of theorists to conclude that English conditionals are not truth-functional. Some have attempted to explain the semantics of conditionals in terms of situational contexts. Mark Alan Wilson examines a recent attempt by Christopher Gauker to explain the semantics of conditionals. Gauker redefines the notion of the context of an utterance and uses it to replace the notion of logical validity with contextual assertibility. Wilson argues that Gauker’s notion of contextual assertibility generates at least two major problems: first, it fails on its own criteria, and second, it licenses intuitively unacceptable utterances. Further, Wilson suggests that the only way Gauker's theory might avoid these problems would be to reduce it to a mere restatement of an earlier theory of conditionals, that of Nelson Goodman.