How to account for the oddness of missing-link conditionals

Igor Douven

pp. 1541-1554

in: Julien Dutant, Davide Fassio, Anne Meylan (eds), Truth & epistemic norms, Synthese 194 (5), 2017.

Abstract

Conditionals whose antecedent and consequent are not somehow internally connected tend to strike us as odd. The received doctrine is that this felt oddness is to be explained pragmatically. Exactly how the pragmatic explanation is supposed to go has remained elusive, however. This paper discusses recent philosophical and psychological work that attempts to account semantically for the apparent oddness of conditionals lacking an internal connection between their parts.