Anderson Conditionals
Current consensus holds that counterfactuals do not presuppose the falsity of the antecedent; if the speaker of a counterfactual conveys the antecedent’s falsity at all, she conversationally implicates it. Most people take this to be obvious for non-past subjunctive conditionals; but many people also think this is the case for past subjunctive conditionals. Anderson Conditionals such as ‘If Jones had taken arsenic, he would have shown the same symptoms he actually shows’ are taken as evidence for this. In this paper, I shall question this argument from Anderson Conditionals.
Current consensus holds that counterfactuals do not presuppose the falsity of the antecedent; if the speaker of a counterfactual conveys the antecedent’s falsity at all, she conversationally implicates it. Most people take this to be obvious for non-past subjunctive conditionals; but many people also think this is the case for past subjunctive conditionals. Anderson Conditionals such as ‘If Jones had taken arsenic, he would have shown the same symptoms he actually shows’ are taken as evidence for this. In this paper, I shall question this argument from Anderson Conditionals.