Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

96 Presuppositions and Pronouns
a sense it is unfortunate that this should be so, because the semantics of
conditionals is a very moot issue indeed. It is generally acknowledged that
the natural-language conditional cannot be identified with the material
implication, as we have done so far and will do for the time being, and a
number of semantic theories are available designed, for example, to avoid
the notorious 'paradoxes' of material implication. But although I agree that
the material implication is at best a very rough approximation to the meaning
of the natural language conditional, I don't think that the problems to be
discussed below are alleviated by adopting a more sophisticated semantics of
if ... . ,. then. To illustrate this point, let us consider the possibility of
incorporating into our dynamic semantics the theory of conditionals
developed by Stalnaker and Lewis, which surely ranks among the more
respectable accounts (see Stalnaker 1968, 1975, Lewis 1973). Formulated in
truth-conditional terms, this analysis says that 'if cp '
instead of '~', '—>', the theory's predictions about conditionals and conjunctions
will diverge: "'{X} \|/{%} presupposes 9 % X but of course -,( -i(cp