An approach to Hurford Conditionals

Abstract

We propose a redundancy-based solution to the puzzle of Hurford con- ditionals. We argue that the puzzle goes away once we recognise that negated and unnegated Hurford disjunctions are not on par. We develop a theory, dubbed super-redundancy, that captures this contrast, and investigate how it can be paired with different approaches to conditionals. It turns out that under super-redundancy, the Hurford conditional paradigm follows under the material implication and strict semantics approaches to conditionals, but not under the variably strict semantics. Finally, we extend our theory to capture some puzzling cases of Hurford phenom- ena that have recently received attention in Marty & Romoli (2022).