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Journal of Logic, Language and Information

Erschienen in:

01.07.2013

Inferential Conditionals and Evidentiality

verfasst von: K. Krzyżanowska, S. Wenmackers, I. Douven

Erschienen in: Journal of Logic, Language and Information | Ausgabe 3/2013

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Abstract

Many conditionals seem to convey the existence of a link between their antecedent and consequent. We draw on a recently proposed typology of conditionals to argue for an old philosophical idea according to which the link is inferential in nature. We show that the proposal has explanatory force by presenting empirical results on the evidential meaning of certain English and Dutch modal expressions.

Vorheriger Artikel An Analytic Tableaux Model for Deductive Mastermind Empirically Tested with a Massively Used Online Learning System

Nächster Artikel Linguistic and Visual Cognition: Verifying Proportional and Superlative Most in Bulgarian and Polish

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For a survey of the main accounts of conditionals as well as the problems they face see, for instance, Edgington (1995), Bennett (2003), or Douven (2011).

As many authors have pointed out, the distinction between indicative and subjunctive conditionals is not as clear-cut as one might wish. However, the conditionals that were used in the materials of our experiments to be reported in this paper were all uncontroversial cases of indicative conditionals.

See, among others, Dancygier (1998, 2003), Dancygier and Sweetser (2005), Declerck and Reed (2001), Haegeman (2003), and Verbrugge (2007).

This description is too broad to allow for a demarcation of content conditionals from other types of conditional sentences. Even though sentences such as “If she never answers his e-mails, he will get very disappointed with her” or “If you take ice out of the deep freeze, it melts” have been described as typical examples of content conditionals (Verbrugge 2007, p. 4), it would seem that those may well be characterized in terms of inferential relations between their antecedents and consequents, and hence labelled as “inferential”.

See for some proposals, Cialdea Mayer and Pirri (1993, 1995), Kyburg and Teng (2001) and Gabbay and Woods (2005).

Note that this typology is not necessarily exhaustive. Following Douven and Verbrugge, we remain non-committal as to whether conditionals expressing, for instance, causal or analogical inferences should be analyzed as separate types or as subclasses of, say, inductive inferential conditionals.

As (Douven and Verbrugge (2010), p. 304), note, in contextual AI conditionals, the consequent need not always be the best explanation of the antecedent. It may also be that the consequent is, in light of the antecedent, the best explanation of one of the background assumptions.

The deeper explanation of these results might be in terms of acceptability conditions, which might be different for the different types of conditionals, or in terms of truth conditions, which might also be different for the different types. See Krzyżanowska (2012) and Krzyżanowska et al. (2013) for an exploration of the idea that the different types of inferential conditionals have different truth conditions.

Note that by taking its explanatory force as evidence for the typology we are relying on abduction. While neither for the purposes of Douven and Verbrugge’s (2010) paper nor for the current use we are making of their proposal is it necessary to make any assumptions about the confirmation-theoretic status of abduction, for independent reasons we do believe that abduction is in much better normative standing than is generally believed, see Douven (2013).

According to Aikhenvald (2004), evidentiality is a grammatical category, and hence lexical items used to mark the source of information, which are available in all languages, are not evidentials in this strict, narrow sense. She argues that what can be found in English and many other European languages are mere evidential strategies. However, not all linguists agree on such a restrictive view. For a discussion of Aikhenvald’s position see, e.g., (Diewald and Smirnova (2010), pp. 3–6).

See, e.g., Willett (1988), Faller (2002) and Matthewson et al. (2007).

Kwon (2012), who identified the Korean evidential -napo- as signalling the presence of an inductive inference, seems to be an exception.

See, for instance, (Matthewson et al. (2007), p. 205 ff) for an analysis of an evidential system of St’át’imcets with two inferential markers; or (Smirnova (2012), p. 12 ff) for a discussion of a clearly abductive inferential evidential in Bulgarian.

See, e.g., (Karttunen (1972), p. 12), (Groenendijk and Stokhof (1975), p. 69), (Veltman (1985), p. 161 ff) and (Kratzer (1991), p. 645).

(Dietz (2008), p. 246) also notes that in “It must be raining”, the auxiliary indicates that the speaker only has (what he calls) “inferential evidence”, and no direct observational evidence, that it is raining. See in the same vein Anderson (1986), Papafragou (1998), van der Auwera and Plungian (1998), Nuyts and Vonk (1999), Salmon (2011), and Mortelmans (2012).

In Dutch, “should” is expressed by means of the verbal complex consisting of a counterfactual auxiliary “zou” and the infinitive “moeten” (“must”). See Huitink (2008) for a discussion of modal concord in Dutch.

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Titel: Inferential Conditionals and Evidentiality
verfasst von: K. Krzyżanowska
S. Wenmackers
I. Douven
Publikationsdatum: 01.07.2013
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in: Journal of Logic, Language and Information / Ausgabe 3/2013
Print ISSN: 0925-8531
Elektronische ISSN: 1572-9583
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10849-013-9178-4

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