Suppose and Tell

Download or read book Suppose and Tell written by Timothy Williamson and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does 'if' mean? This book argues for a new approach to understanding conditionals, based on the idea that in assessing them we are guided by psychological heuristics, fast and frugal methods, mostly but not always reliable, although the user may have no advance warning from the inside of their fallibility. As a result, philosophers and linguists have been led astray in theorizing about conditionals, because they have taken erroneous judgements about examples as data; simple theories have been too quickly dismissed. The main heuristic involves making a supposition and exploring its consequences, often in the imagination. Although powerful, this methods can lead to paradoxes. A secondary heuristic is to accept heuristic are sometimes in tension. However, formal results help show why the simple 'material' semantics makes the best sense of the two heuristics, even though they generate apparent counter-examples to that semantics. The second half of the book presents a new theory of the meaning of counterfactuals about what would be if things were different; it is explained in terms of the separate meanings of 'if' and 'would'. This account is applied to the role of counterfactuals in thought experiments. Suppose and Tell: The Semantics and Heuristics of Conditionals analyses a wide variety of linguistic data, and discusses the cognitive value of conditionals in our lives, from everyday decision-making to mathematical proofs. Wider implications are drawn for the nature of meaning and its non-transparency to native speakers, vagueness in thought and language, and the need for semantics to attend to the unreliable heuristics underlying our judgements. Book jacket.