ABSTRACT
As there is a problem about relating entailment to strict IMPLICATION and its ‘paradoxes’, so there is one about relating the standard ‘if’ of ordinary thought to material implication and its ‘paradoxes’. One cannot truly say ‘If p then q’ when p is true and q is false, i.e. when p does not materially imply q. But can one say it in all other cases? or must p and q be somehow relevant to each other? Or must some other condition be fulfilled? Some say that relevance has nothing to do with the meaning if ‘If p then q’, but that general conventions forbid us to utter it when p and q are mutually irrelevant. ‘If that’s so, I’m a Dutchman’ may be an excep-tion to these conventions, relying for its effect on contrast to the normal case (Strawson; see IMPLICATION (last paragraph)). Also should we distinguish between asserting a conditional and conditionally asserting its consequent? Perhaps in saying ‘If p then q’ we are simply asserting q conditionally, in which case when p is false, ‘If p then q’ is neither true nor false but simply inapposite.
