About Conditio

Conditio (“Semantics of Conditionals”) is a research project of the Department of Logic and the Methodology of Sciences (Comenius University Bratislava, Faculty of Arts). Funded by the Slovak Research and Development Agency, the project began on 1 July 2022 and will span four years, finishing in 2026.

Project abstract

The project pursues two crucial research objectives:

to test the main theories of indicative and subjunctive conditionals using an enriched and diversified database of instances of conditionals and inferences from different domains of science and philosophy in order to attain a more complex assessment of those theories,
to propose an adequate and consistent semantic theory of conditional imperatives that will distinguish between the propositional nature of their antecedents and the conative nature of their consequents and that will allow for their use in practical inferences.

The project is expected to arrive at robust evidence pertaining to areas such as law, ethics, science, philosophy of science, philosophy and aesthetics which would enable a more comprehensive evaluation of the theories of conditionals based on their predictive (hypothetico-deductive model) and explanatory (abductive model) power. The project’s goal is also to propose a hybrid theory of conditional imperatives that relies on an expressively rich logico-semantic theory: Transparent intensional logic (TIL).

The project’s main hypothesis is the claim that testing the pre-selected theories by twelve types of data coming from different domains will help evaluate the theories in a more complex and comprehensive manner than using standard counterexamples or traditional arguments in their favor. Thus, the project enhances the current state of the art of the semantics of indicative, subjunctive and normative conditionals.

Goals

Our main goals are as follows:

to create a rich and diversified database of test-cases of conditionals and conditional inferences
to propose a semantic model of conditional imperatives that is both formally correct and materially adequate
to test the main theories of indicative conditionals using the HD model of testing
to test the main theories of subjunctive conditionals using the HD model of testing
to provide a more comprehensive assessment of theories of conditionals based on the model of inference to the best explanation