Hurford Conditionals

Abstract

Good sounds entirely natural, whereas Bad sounds quite strange. This contrast is puzzling, because Bad and Good have the same structure at a certain level of logical abstraction: (1) If ¬p + , then p. We argue that existing theories of informational oddness do not distinguish between Bad and Good. We do not have an account of the divergence in judgments about the two, but we think this is a fascinating puzzle which we pose here in the hope others will be able to solve it.

Varieties of Hurford disjunctions

“…Yet this description may not be general enough. Mandelkern & Romoli (2018) show for instance that similar infelicity e ects reproduce with conditionals, as illustrated in ( 25), and we note here that such e ects reproduce in hybrid cases like (26) where the second disjunct involves a (non-Hurfordian) conditional in place of a disjunction. 18 (25) Hurford Conditional #If John is not in Paris, he is in France.…”

An approach to Hurford Conditionals

“…Indeed, the literature on Hurford disjunctions has accepted this: for instance Mandelkern & Romoli 2018 explicitly give a judgement where (2b) is odd. However, Mandelkern & Romoli 2018 show that once this basic picture is in place, a simple yet quite fiendish puzzle arises. Suppose that we treat the conditional as material implication and consider the following paradigm:…”