Philosophy
Part 1A Meaning: Conditionals
This is the web page for the Philosophy Part 1A course ‘Meaning: Conditionals’ given by Richard Holton at the University of Cambridge, Lent Term 2023. This page will provide links to papers and other texts that may be useful and to pdf versions of the handouts. If you have suggestions or comments, please let me know by emailing me at rjh221@cam.ac.uk
The main aim of this course is to provide an introductory discussion of the indicative conditional in English, and of whether its truth conditions are properly represented by the standard material conditional of the propositional calculus.
If you haven't done an introductory logic class before, it would be worth having a look at how the conditional is used there; for instance, in Section 5 of the text used in Cambridge, 'Forallx:Cambridge'.
Lecture 1: Indicative Conditionals, Material Conditionals, & Conversational Implicature
Primary
- H. P. Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), ch. 2 'Logic and Conversation'.
Secondary
- Ed Mares, Relevance Logic Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (for discussion of the alternative strategy of reforming the logic; this is fairly hard going in places)
Lecture 2: Jackson, Robustness & Conventional Implicature
Primary
- Frank Jackson, 'On Assertion and Indicative Conditionals'
Secondary
- Dorothy Edgington 'Indicative Conditionals' Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (a good introduction to the rest of the literature on indicative conditionals; as you will see, this has become a large and complicated topic)