Disjunctive antecedent conditionals
Name
KHODACv1.pdf
Description
Accepted version
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533.13 KB
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Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Khoo, Justin Donald
Date Issued
July 2018
Journal
Synthese
Publisher
Springer Nature America, Inc
Citation
Khoo, Justin, "Disjunctive antecedent conditionals." Synthese 2018 (July 2018): doi 10.1007/S11229-018-1877-6 ©2018 Author(s)
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Disjunctive antecedent conditionals (DACs)—conditionals of the form if A or B, C—sometimes seem to entail both of their simplifications (if A, C; if B, C) and sometimes seem not to. I argue that this behavior reveals a genuine ambiguity in DACs. Along the way, I discuss a new observation about the role of focal stress in distinguishing the two interpretations of DACs. I propose a new theory, according to which the surface form of a DAC underdetermines its logical form: on one possible logical form, if A or B, C does entail both of its simplifications, while on the other, it does not.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/S11229-018-1877-6
