Editing Indicative conditional (section)

==Formal analyses==

Early analyses identified indicative conditionals with the [[logical connective|logical operation]] known as the [[material conditional]]. According to the material conditional analysis, an indicative "If A then B" is true unless A is true and B is not. Although this analysis covers many observed cases, it misses some crucial properties of actual conditional speech and reasoning.

One problem for the material conditional analysis is that it allows indicatives to be true even when their antecedent and [[consequent]] are unrelated. For instance, the indicative "If Paris is in France then trout are fish" is intuitively strange since the location of Paris has nothing to do with the classification of trout. However, since its antecedent and the consequent are both true, the material conditional analysis treats it as a true statement. Similarly, the material conditional analysis treats conditionals with false antecedents as [[vacuous truth|vacuously true]]. For instance, since Paris is not in Australia, the conditional "If Paris is in Australia, then trout are fish" would be treated as true on a material conditional analysis. These arguments have been taken to show that no [[truth-functional]] operator will suffice as a semantics for indicative conditionals. In the mid-20th century, work by [[H.P. Grice]], [[Frank Cameron Jackson]], and others attempted to maintain the material conditional as an analysis of indicatives' literal semantic denotation, while appealing to [[pragmatics]] in order to explain the apparent discrepancies.<ref>{{cite encyclopedia |last= Edgington |first= Dorothy |author-link=Dorothy Edgington |editor-last1=Zalta |editor-first1=Edward|encyclopedia= |title=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy |url=https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/conditionals/ |access-date=2021-01-03 |year=2020}}</ref>

Contemporary work in [[philosophical logic]] and [[formal semantics (natural language)|formal semantics]] generally proposes alternative denotations for indicative conditionals. Proposed alternatives include analyses based on [[relevance logic]], [[modal logic]], [[probability theory]], [[Angelika Kratzer|Kratzer]]ian modal semantics, and [[dynamic semantics]].<ref>{{cite encyclopedia |last= Edgington |first= Dorothy |author-link=Dorothy Edgington |editor-last1=Zalta |editor-first1=Edward|encyclopedia= |title=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy |url=https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/conditionals/ |access-date=2021-01-03 |year=2020}}</ref>