Krzyżanowska, K. and Collins, Peter J. and Hahn, Ulrike (2017) Between a conditional’s antecedent and its consequent: discourse coherence vs. probabilistic relevance. Cognition 164 , pp. 199-205. ISSN 0010-0277.
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Abstract
Reasoning with conditionals is central to everyday life, yet there is long-standing disagreement about the meaning of the conditional. One example is the puzzle of so-called missing-link conditionals such as “if raccoons have no wings, they cannot breathe under water.” Their oddity may be taken to show that conditionals require a connection between antecedent (“raccoons have no wings”) and consequent (“they cannot breathe under water”), yet most accounts of conditionals attribute the oddity to natural-language pragmatics. We present an experimental study disentangling the pragmatic requirement of discourse coherence from a stronger notion of connection: probabilistic relevance. Results indicate that mere discourse coherence is not enough to make conditionals assertable.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | Indicative conditionals, Probabilistic relevance, Discourse coherence, Assertability |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 05 Jul 2017 14:17 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:33 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/19067 |
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