The Projection Strategy and the Truth: Conditions of Conditional Statements

Abstract

'Indicative are merely expressions of 'conditional beliefs', that is, of 'the agent's dispositions to change what he accepts in response to new information' (p. 102). As argued by Alan Gibbard (I98I) they do not also have truth-conditional contents, or (what for present purposes comes to the same thing) express propositions. More accurately, they are 'too closely tied to the epistemic states of the agents who utter them for those conditionals to express propositions which could be separated from the contexts in which they are accepted' (p. i i i). Other conditional statements, including 'subjunctive conditionals' do, however, express such propositions. The truth conditions of these conditionals are to be secured by the projection strategy, according to which the propositions they express 'should be understood as propositions about features of the world which justify certain [rational] policies for changing one's belief[s] in response to potential new information' (p. II9). The application of the projection strategy, finally, supports Stalnaker's own well-known possible worlds semantics for conditionals (see Stalnaker, I98I, and Stalnaker and Thomason, I970), and casts doubt on its rivals (such as the semantics of Lewis, I973).