Episode 79: Anthony S. Gillies discusses conditionals
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What are conditionals and why are they important in everyday conversation?
Hey, Matt Techman here from Elucidations. Before we get going today, I just thought I'd ask if you're a fan of the show, to maybe go to our iTunes page and leave a rating and a review, and that way more people can discover it. Alright, thanks.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman, and with me today is Tony Gillis, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brutgers University, and he is here to talk about conditionals. Tony Gillis, welcome. Hi Matt, thanks. So philosophers are really interested in conditional statements, which are if then statements. So if I put sugar in my coffee, then it'll taste good. Statements like that. People in all different areas of philosophy lately have been interested in conditionals. Why is that? Why are conditionals so interesting?
Well, they're interesting in philosophy for lots of reasons, but they're interesting full stop because we use them all the time in regular conversation. So they're useful for figuring out whether or not we have to order more beer. So if I say to you when we're at the pub, if we're all out of beer, it's time for you to order another round. And in fact we are all out of beer. Guess what? You're up for buying the next round. So linking up matters of fact with some conditional bits is what they're good for. We use them all the time for that. Figuring out what you're going to do next, figuring out where we should look for lost items. If I've lost some of my marbles and I know that some of them are over here and others of them are over there.
I might ask you to help me and say, Look, if they're not in the place I look, then go check the garage 'cause I haven't looked there yet. So they're good for structuring our uncertainty about where things are. They're good for figuring out what we should do next. So they're just good, full stop. The role they have in different areas of philosophy tend to be because they help us hook up some things that we're certain about with other things that we're uncertain about and so philosophers naturally reach for them when they're doing their theorizing, like philosophy of science for causation or something like that. But the main reason why they're interesting is just because they're part of our regular cognitive toolbox as humans.
One of the things that you've worked on a lot is this project of giving a semantics for conditional statements, which you can think of as trying to give a formal theory of what a conditional if-then statement means. What are some of the challenges there? Why is it difficult to say what? If I put sugar in my coffee, it'll taste good, means.
Well once you're interested in c in talking about conditionals. You get interested in this problem, okay, what is it that they express? So we somehow use them to convey conditional information to one another. If such and such is or turns out to be the case, then such and such might or must be the case. So if I put sugar in my coffee, then it will taste sweet. Something like that. So that's the idea of conditional information. Okay, so now we haven't said anything at all. We've just said conditionals somehow say something about conditional information. Well, what's that conditional information? The project of saying how conditionals manage to express this conditional information is the project comes in kind of two steps.
One is to figure out what it is they say. somehow they relate certain possibilities or scenarios to other possibilities. They r relate the scenarios in which the first part of the conditional statement, the if part, is true, to scenarios in which the then part is true.
How do philosophers distinguish between indicative and counterfactual conditionals?
And they do this systematically. So we have to figure out first what they mean. And then the second task is to figure out how it is that they can carry that meaning. So How it is that they can contribute that conditional information when the sentence occurs surrounded by other sentences or other logical words, like not. It's not the case that. So we want to figure out what if then means so that it fits in with what we think not means.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What are conditionals and why are they important in everyday conversation?
0:00–3:52
2
How do philosophers distinguish between indicative and counterfactual conditionals?
3:52–8:04
3
What challenges arise when trying to give a formal semantics to simple ‘if‑then’ statements?
8:04–12:46
4
Why does the “or‑to‑if” inference create a problem for ordinary conditionals?
12:46–16:05
5
How does the strict conditional account attempt to solve these inference problems?
16:05–20:27
6
What is the Ramsey test and how does it relate to the meaning of conditionals?
20:27–24:26
7
Why have counterfactuals experienced a resurgence of interest in recent philosophy?
24:26–28:31
8
What are ‘Sobel sequences’ and how do they illustrate the difficulty of reverse reasoning with conditionals?
28:31–32:24
Speakers
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