Conditionals (Bradford Books)

✍ Scribed by Nicholas Rescher

• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 261
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book by distinguished philosopher Nicholas Rescher seeks to clarify the idea of what a conditional says by elucidating the information that is normally transmitted by its utterance. The result is a unified treatment of conditionals based on epistemological principles rather than the semantical principles in vogue over recent decades. This approach, argues Rescher, makes it easier to understand how conditionals actually function in our thought and discourse. In its concern with what language theorists call pragmatics--the study of the norms and principles governing our use of language in conveying information--Conditionals steps beyond the limits of logic as traditionally understood and moves into the realm claimed by theorists of artificial intelligence as they try to simulate our actual information-processing practices.The book's treatment of counterfactuals essentially revives an epistemological approach proposed by F. P. Ramsey in the 1920s and developed by Rescher himself in the 1960s but since overshadowed by the now-dominant possible-worlds approach. Rescher argues that the increasingly evident liabilities of the possible-worlds strategy make a reappraisal of the older style of analysis both timely and desirable. As the book makes clear, an epistemological approach demonstrates that counterfactual reasoning, unlike inductive inference, is not a matter of abstract reasoning alone but one of good judgment and common sense.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 10
Preface......Page 12
1 - Fundamentals......Page 16
2 - Matters of Aspect......Page 30
3 - Modes of Implication......Page 46
4 - Conditional Complications......Page 66
5 - Doxastic Implication and Plausibility......Page 74
6 - Inferentially Insuperable Boundaries and Homogeneous Conditionals......Page 82
7 - Counterfactual Conditionals and Their Problematic Nature......Page 88
8 - Salience and Questioner’s Prerogative......Page 104
9 - On Validating Counterfactuals......Page 118
10 - Further Complications of Counterfactuality......Page 154
11 - Some Logical Features of Counterfactuals......Page 164
12 - Variant Analyses of Counterfactuals......Page 176
13 - Historical Counterfactuals......Page 192
14 - Per impossibile Counterfactuals and Reductio ad absurdum Conditionals......Page 200
15 - Problems with Possible Worlds......Page 210
Conclusion......Page 232
Notes......Page 236
References......Page 246
Name Index......Page 258