Arguments, Suppositions, and Conditionals

Abstract

Arguments and conditionals are powerful means natural languages provide us to reason about possibilities and to reach conclusions from premises. These two kinds of constructions exhibit several affinities—e.g., they both come in different varieties depending on the mood; they share some of the same connectives (i.e., ‘then’); they also allow for similar patterns of modal subordination. In the light of these affinities, it is not surprising that prominent theories of conditionals—old and new suppositionalisms and dynamic theories of conditionals—as well as certain reductive theories of arguments tend to semantically assimilate conditionals and arguments. In this paper, I shall marshall some linguistic evidence as well as some theoretical considerations for thinking that, despite these similarities, arguments and conditionals should be given a different semantics. In the final part of the paper, extending and improving on Kocurek & Pavese 2022, I make some progress outlining a framework that has the potential to capture the affinities of conditionals and arguments, while modeling their differences too.