The Meaning of If, by Justin Khoo

Extract

This is a wonderful book that uses careful, data-driven theorizing to motivate an Inferentialist and Non-factualist—although not Expressivist—semantics and theory of content for conditionals. According to Khoo’s theory, conditionals of all types encode (although speakers do not use them to express) inferential dispositions, and environments embedding conditionals are sometimes sensitive to their inferential content.

The book is technically masterful; Khoo has a knack for formal elegance. As with Bennett [3], discussions of core technical issues are, in large part, disarmingly straightforward. (Some, it should be said, are more daunting, but diligent readers should generally be able to get the gist.) Khoo’s command of the sprawling and multidisciplinary literature on conditionals is remarkable. A wide array of phenomena about conditionals is brought under the heading of a unified theory. I don’t know an account with broader empirical coverage. Comparison with Bennett shows the degree to which philosophy of language has advanced, both empirically and theoretically, over the last twenty years.