Chimerical conditionals

Abstract

This paper introduces and analyzes chimerical conditionals, a class of conditionals that are puzzling vis-à-vis the distinction between so-called "biscuit" and hypothetical conditionals. An analysis of this distinction is developed which draws on the pragmatic account of Franke 2009. Building on this analysis, chimericity is then shown to derive from a systematic ambiguity of a definite and often implicit argument in the consequent of chimerical conditionals, between a rigid designator and an individual concept reading. This ambiguity is argued to arise from different ways in which context can resolve familiarity presuppositions. One consequence of the inquiry is that the notion of (in)dependence employed in much work on conditionals cannot be viewed as a relation between propositions, but must be made sensitive to the dynamics of information flow.

Counterfactual biscuit conditionals: A temporal remoteness Approach

“…The unified independence-based approach proposed for hypothetical and biscuit indicative conditionals (Franke (2009), Francez (2015, Lauer (2015), Csipak (2018), Biezma & Goebel (2018), Goebel (2017), a.o.) has been extended to hypothetical and biscuit counterfactucal conditionals to derive the entire pattern in (48)-(51) by combining the temporal remoteness approach to counterfactual morphology with the following key ingredients: (i) breaking Sequence of Tense and Sequence of Mood in an extension of Ogihara (1999), (ii) competition between more informative vs. less informative forms and (iii) the Gricean Principle of Manner.…”

“…( (Franke (2009), Francez (2015, Lauer (2015), Csipak (2018), Biezma & Goebel (2018), Goebel (2017), a.o.). In a nutshell, they propose that the syntactic and semantic modal template is the same for hypothetical and biscuit conditionals (contra e.g.…”

Metalinguistic conditionals and the role of explicit content

“…Franke 2009is a strong proponent of this pragmatic view, which has been followed and refined by Francez (2015) and Lauer (2014), among others. A Franke-style pragmatic analysis is also followed by Csipak (2016) for her category of discourse-structuring conditionals that are closely related to the class of metalinguistic conditionals as discussed in the previous section.…”

Laws for biscuits: Independence and dependence in conditionals

“…But how is this related to the fact that from HCs we oftentimes or normally learn about a dependence holding between antecedent and consequent? Francez (2015) formulates a most plausible intuition about the connection of knowledge of dependence and independence: Independence in a BC reading springs from the fact that a relation of dependence between the propositions at play is excluded by mutual knowledge of the participants about causal and epistemic dependencies. The connection between independence and dependence cannot be grasped by the metareasoning account.…”

“…Considering such a state, it would satisfy (5) since for every possible combination of truth-values of the propositions in question there would be at least one world in the state. Because of this, Francez (2015) states that (5) is merely a structural property of an information state. This structural property is ambiguous between being interpreted as independence or ignorance about a dependence.…”