Abstracts
Nathan Klinedinst (UCL)
Higginbotham (1986) observed that quantified conditionals have a stronger meaning than might be expected, as attested by the apparent equivalence of examples like 'No student will pass if he goofs off' and 'Every student will fail if he goofs off'. Higginbotham’s observation follows straightforwardly given the validity of Conditional Excluded Middle (as observed by von Fintel and Iatridou (2002)), and as such could be taken as evidence thereof (e.g. Williams 2009). However, the empirical status of CEM has been disputed, and it is invalid under many prominent approaches – notably Lewis 1973 for counterfactuals, also Kratzer 1979, 1991. More acutely, Higginbotham’s observation holds even for quantified counterparts of conditionals that appear not to obey CEM (Higginbotham 2003), and the standard way of explaining (away) such apparent counterexamples to the principle, à la Stalnaker 1981, does not directly yield an account of our apparent truth-conditional intuitions about the quantified counterparts (as reported by e.g. Leslie 2009). This paper provides an explanation for the latter intuitions within Stalnaker’s framework, the upshot being that CEM does remain a viable explanation, in principle, for Higginbotham’s observation.