Towards a Radically Pragmatic Theory of If-Conditionals Gunnar Björnsson

It is generally agreed that constructions of the form “if P, Q ” are capable of conveying a number of different relations between antecedent and consequent, with pragmatics playing a central role in determining these relations. Controversy concerns what the conventional contribution of the if-clause is, how it constrains the pragmatic processes, and what those processes are. In this essay, I begin to argue that the conventional contribution of if-clauses to semantics is exhausted by the fact that these clauses introduce a proposition without presenting it as true so that the consequent can be understood in relation to it. Given our cognitive interests in such non-truth-presentational introductions, conditionals will make salient the wide but nevertheless disciplined variety of contents that we naturally attribute to them; no further substantial constraints of the sorts proposed by standard theories of conditionals are needed to explain the phenomena. If this is correct, it provides prima facie evidence for a radically contextualist account of conditionals according to which conditionals have no truth-evaluable or intuitively complete content absent some contextually provided, sufficiently salient relation between antecedent and consequent. 2. The challenge: Making sense of great but restricted variation As illustrated by the following list, if-conditionals are capable of conveying a wide variety of relations between the antecedent (the content represented by the if-clause), and the consequent (the content represented by the main clause): (1) If you are really hungry, you will have a hard time concentrating. (2) If you are really hungry, you didn’t eat enough. (3) If you are really hungry, you should order something else