It seems that in most everyday cases, taking conditionals to have material truth conditions suffices for us to reason with them correctly (in the sense that using material truth conditions will most often uncontroversially take us from true premises to true conclusions, even if the actual material truth conditions for conditionals are, strictly speaking, incorrect in a generalized context).
No doubt there are many cases where material truth conditions for indicative conditionals seem to be harmful to our ability to reason effectively. For example, if I uttered the conditional "If I had a counter-example to Fermat's Last Theorem, nobody would care", then material truth conditions would force this utterance to be true. There are many other examples in the literature. Fortunately, we don't often deal with bizarre conditionals like these (outside of the logical literature). On top of this, even when we are dealing with bizarre conditionals, we can use natural language to mitigate for ambiguity issues by specifying our own semantics. We could say something like "if, in an impossible world where I had a counter-example to Fermat's Last Theorem, people would definitely care, and not vacuously so." In a sense, we have used natural language to specify our own conditional semantics. Are there philosophical issues with doing this? Sure. Are there are practical issues (even within the context of philosophy minus logic)? It's not so clear me.
My question then is the following: why should we care as philosophers what the true semantics for indicative conditionals are, especially given that we can always mitigate ambiguity/logical issues with natural language (in particular, by specifying our our own semantics for the conditionals we utter on a case by case basis)? I agree conditional semantics is an interesting topic in its own right, but there is only so much time in the day, and there are many other interesting philosophical questions to think about as well. So why this one above others?
PS -- For the record, I've spent a great deal of time thinking about conditional semantics. I mean to ask this question in good spirit (and not in a nagging one).
Why do Conditional Semantics matter?
Re: Why do Conditional Semantics matter?
George_S wrote:My question then is the following: why should we care as philosophers what the true semantics for indicative conditionals are, especially given that we can always mitigate ambiguity/logical issues with natural language (in particular, by specifying our our own semantics for the conditionals we utter on a case by case basis)?
I don't particularly care, for precisely the reason you give. I agree with Popper: "It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." I think it is demonstrably the case that natural language, as you intimate, is context laden. As I was just saying to WanderingLands (sort of), I think people who dwell too long on logic (applied to vernacular) don't understand the difference between ontology and epistemology.
Re: Why do Conditional Semantics matter?
uwot wrote:George_S wrote:My question then is the following: why should we care as philosophers what the true semantics for indicative conditionals are, especially given that we can always mitigate ambiguity/logical issues with natural language (in particular, by specifying our our own semantics for the conditionals we utter on a case by case basis)?
I don't particularly care, for precisely the reason you give. I agree with Popper: "It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." I think it is demonstrably the case that natural language, as you intimate, is context laden. As I was just saying to WanderingLands (sort of), I think people who dwell too long on logic (applied to vernacular) don't understand the difference between ontology and epistemology.
I think this is a good point, because it is important to understand we are dealing with different types of 'truths'. In this case we could talk about the difference between ontology and epistemology.
Just to add that when it comes to thought experiments in philosophy there is a need to consider three important variables. Namely,conceivability, physical possibility and metaphysical possibility.