The Meaning of If - Hardcover

Khoo, Justin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0190096705 ISBN 13: 9780190096700

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2022

Synopsis

This is an open access title. It is available to read and download as a free PDF version on Oxford Scholarship Online. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence.

Despite its small stature, "if" occupies a central place both in everyday language and the philosophical lexicon. In allowing us to talk about hypothetical situations, "if" raises a host of thorny philosophical puzzles about language and logic. Addressing them requires tools from linguistics, logic, probability theory, and metaphysics. Justin Khoo uses these tools to navigate a maze of interconnected issues about conditionals, some of which include: the nature of linguistic communication, the relationship between logical and natural languages, and the relationship between different kinds of modality.

According to Khoo's theory, conditionals form a unified class of expressions which share a common semantic core that encodes inferential dispositions. Thus, rather than represent the world, conditionals are devices used to communicate how we are disposed to infer. Khoo shows that this theory can be extended to predict the probabilities of conditionals, as well as how different kinds of conditionals differ both semantically and pragmatically.

Khoo's book will make for a significant contribution to the literature on conditionals and should be of interest to philosophers, linguists, and computer scientists.

About this title

About the Author

Justin Khoo is Associate Professor of Philosophy at MIT. He received his BA in philosophy from UC-Davis in 2006 and his PhD in philosophy from Yale in 2013. His research and teaching are focused primarily on philosophy of language, philosophical logic, meta-ethics, and metaphysics. His work has appeared in various journals, including Journal of Semantics, Mind, Noûs, and Philosophers' Imprint, among others. He co-edited (with Rachel Katharine Sterken) the Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language (2021).

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0190096705
• ISBN 13: 9780190096700
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 372