Jackson Classifying Conditionals

V.H. DUDMAN

In his ‘Classifying Conditionals’ {ANALYSIS 50.2, March 1990, pp. 134-47), Frank Jackson offers a semantic case for classifying “future indicatives” and “past indicatives” together, and apart from “past subjunctives”.  I shall examine, not his arguments, but some of the evidence he bases them on.  It seems to me that this evidence, corrected and properly understood, not only imperils the taxonomy he advocates but also overturns one of his basic preconceptions.
    For easy reference, let me introduce my examples at once.  I shall be adverting to just the “future indicative” interpretations, m1 and m2 respectively, of (1) and (2) and the “past subjunctive” interpretations m3 and m4 of (3) and (4), below.  The scare quotes are because I abominate the terms.  And indeed Jackson, disavowing their doctrinal implications, resorts to them purely for their customary extensions (pp. 134f., 146):

(1)	If Sly Pete calls he will win
(2)	If Sly Pete calls he will lose
(3)	If Sly Pete had called he would have won
(4)	If Sly Pete had called he would have lost.

Informant A, observer of a poker game between Sly Pete and a single opponent, does not know what is in either player’s hand, but she understands that Sly Pete, privy by stealth to his opponent’s cards, knows the contents of both, and she further understands that Sly Pete is bent upon winning.  Informant B, in sharp contradistinction, can see both hands, and that Sly Pete’s is the weaker, but knows nothing about the cheating.  The game has reached its apogee, with Sly Pete about to call or fold.  Now if at this juncture A affirms m1 or B m2, it will in Jackson’s view be ‘with full justification’ (p. 143).  And if B is thereupon expelled from the room and learns nothing more in the interim, then what she knows after the game will justify her affirming m4 (p. 143).  But if A, similarly expelled, learns nothing in the meantime, what she knows after the game will not justify her affirming m3, for the ‘right credence’ for A to lend m3 after the game is only 50 per cent (p. 144).  Now if all this were so then certainly we should have a semantic difference between “future indicatives” and “past subjunctives”, established by A’s different reactions to m1 and m3.  But I have my reservations about these submissions of Jackson’s.
    One concerns the terms in which they are presented.  I am unhappy with ‘justified affirmation’ and ‘right credence’ as observational phenomena. I see them as higher-order matters, ill-suited to handling empirical evidence.  How might we collect evidence of justified affirmation?  By polling native speakers and asking what they thought?  Disputes about justification can go on and on.  When I polled native speakers I would be asking them which messages they would affirm, or perhaps better, assent to, in particular circumstances, and, in their own words, why.  – That said, I can urge a more pointed objection.
Allan Gibbard, whose creature Sly Pete is, conducted ‘informal polls’ and found that, while most respondents thought that in A’s place they would assent to m1, some demurred ([3], p. 228).  Now if this result is correct then one of Jackson’s fundamental preconceptions is mistaken.  He wants the speaker’s present information to be the arbiter of (justified) assent to a conditional.  But Gibbard gets assent to vary while keeping speaker information constant.  It is therefore dangerous for Jackson to dismiss Gibbard’s result as a ‘complication’ (p. 143n), especially when this means presuming without evidence that Gibbard’s dissidents either understand English imperfectly or are confused in their thinking.  I favour the more timorous course of saving Gibbard’s result, and accordingly seek a theory of conditionals which explains how m1 can elicit diverse reactions from A.  In feeling towards it I shall be guided by the pious hope that, when Gibbard’s informants assent or dissent to or from a conditional, they do so for rational, intelligible reasons.
    Jackson says B would be fully justified in affirming m2, and certainly it would be a rare B who did not assent to it.  Evidently the underlying reasoning is along these lines:

	Sly Pete holds a losing hand.  So if he calls it will be with a losing hand: if he 	calls he will lose.

It will be observed that this reasoning exacts a conclusion about the future from a premiss about the present.  Evidently B expects the present contents of the hands to persist unchanged into the future, so that when Sly Pete calls, he still holds the worse hand.  A safe bet, certainly; but a necessary presumption nonetheless.
    The same B who assents to m2 before the event assents to m4 after it.  Jackson says m4 is ‘supported by the information that warrants the assertion of’ (2) under m2 (p. 143).  Same underlying reasoning, too, I suppose.

	Sly Pete held a losing hand, so if he had called it would have been with a 	losing hand.

And reliant on the same expectation, if I may still so call it: that the players’ hands remain unchanged from the time of B’s expulsion from the room until the time for Sly Pete to call or fold.
    As Gibbard discovered, A may or may not assent to m1 before the event.  If she does, the underlying reasoning must be as follows:

	(X) 	Sly Pete is out to win and knows whose hand is better, so if he does not 		hold a winning hand at the moment of decision, he will refrain from 		calling.  Therefore if he calls it will be with a winning hand; if he calls 		he will win.

    Again a future conclusion is got from present premisses.  And the basic means is the same as before: a present state of affairs is expected to persist into the future.  But the present state of affairs this time is Sly Pete’s illicit knowledge.  (Together with his will to win, which I shall henceforth ignore for brevity.) We can remark in passing that this reasoning is more complicated than B’s.  Less usual, too, concerned with how the if-condition comes to be satisfied.  Compare p. 165 of [1].
    The dissident A’s who withhold their assent from m1 are evidently moved by some such reasoning as this:

	Sly Pete may for all I know hold the weaker hand.  If Sly Pete calls while 	holding the weaker hand he will lose.  So for all I know Sly Pete may not win 	if he calls.

Once more a future conclusion is got from present premisses.  And by the same device:  some present state of affairs is expected to persist unchanged into the future, up until at least the time of the if-condition’s satisfaction.  In this case it is the hands the players presently hold, just as it was when B assented to m2.  They will be hands unknown to A that the players hold when Sly Pete calls or folds, but they will be the same unknown hands as they hold now.  It is implicit in the reasoning that Sly Pete is to call or fold with the hand he holds now.  The 50 per cent chance A assigns to his winning if he calls is the 50 per cent chance she assigns to his holding the better hand now.
    Incidentally, we can be confident both that A expects Sly Pete’s illicit knowledge to persist and that she expects the hands to remain unchanged.  But her reaction to m1 will use just one of these expectations for bridging the temporal gap between premisses and conclusion.  Which of the two depends on how she is arguing.  Ramsey’s idea of referring messages like m1 to someone’s ‘stock of beliefs’ is too crude.  A’s reaction to m1 depends on how she is arguing, and premisses can be found among her stock of beliefs for arguments of opposite tendency.  The question is not what is in the stock, but what particular use particular elements of the stock are put to in the course of some particular exercise of reasoning.
    m3 provides A with exactly the options after the event that she enjoyed before it from m1.  She can consider how the if-condition came to be satisfied, rely on preserving Sly Pete’s illicit knowledge, and assent to m3.  Or she can consider developments when the if-condition came to be satisfied, rely on preserving the hands, and withdraw her assent.
    Jackson won’t have this.  He insists on keeping the hands.  When he concludes that m1 rates a credence in A of only 50 per cent, it is because he is using sameness of hands to bridge the gap between the time of A’s expulsion and that of Sly Pete’s call.  His actual argument invokes a ‘right or best thing for Sly Pete to do’, which turns out to be dependent exactly on the hands:

	What A can be sure about though is that Sly Pete will do the right, in the sense 	of the most rewarding, thing.  That is his return for cheating.  But what is the 	right thing for Sly Pete to do?  The answer depends on whether or not he has 	the stronger hand. (pp. 143f).

It seems to me we might equally argue

	A can be sure that Sly Pete would have done the right thing.  Therefore she 	can be sure he wouldn’t call without a winning hand.  Etc.
But the ‘most rewarding thing’ idea is overdrawn anyway: If A accords m3 a 50 per cent credence after the event it is simply because she is preserving the hands while having no idea whose was better.  My real criticism is that Jackson has arbitrarily excluded a genuine alternative.
    Why must A use the hands?  If we asked Sly Pete afterwards why he folded he would undoubtedly use the hands, just as B did in reaction to m4, saying ‘If I had called I would have lost’.  But of course: Sly Pete chose whether to call by foreseeing consequences of his calling, not by considering how he might have come to call. But that has no tendency to disqualify the other line of argument for A, or even for Sly Pete himself in another vein.  Nor has the reflection that time has marched on and left the players’ actual hands fixed forever.  The march of time has left everything in the past fixed, Sly Pete’s illicit knowledge no less than the players’ hands.  
    No doubt the presumption that A has only one “justified” reaction to m3 discourages recognition of rival lines or argument.  But it means Jackson has to find fault when A reasons after the event as follows, and I cannot think where a fault might lie:

	(Y)	Sly Pete knew whose hand was better at the time of my ejection; so if 		he had not held a winning hand at his moment of decision he wouldn’t 		have refrained from calling.  Therefore if he had called it would have 		been with a winning hand.

The onus here is with Jackson.  A natural response to arguments (X) and (Y) is that the reasoning is the same, the purely formal differences between the two passages there solely to allow for a difference of time.  Indeed this proposal can be made very exact.  Perhaps ‘calls’ and ‘will win’ in (1) register presentness because m1’s underlying reasoning starts from how things are now, while ‘had called’ and ‘would have won’ in (3) register pastpastness because m3’s underlying reasoning starts from how things were at a point past with respect to the already past call.
    My charge, at all events, is that Jackson achieves his discrepant data about m1 and m3 arbitrarily.  At the outset he excludes a whole dimension by permitting only one “justified” reaction to m1 or m3.  This means cutting down on cases.  But he cuts down on cases by depriving m1 of one line of argument and m3 of the other.  Whence the semantic distinction he thinks to see between “future indicatives” and “past subjunctives”.
    A’s reaction to m1 or m3 will depend, as I have said, on her underlying argument.  Here two points.  First, the choice of how to argue is simply free.  There can be no right or wrong about it: the entire enterprise is a creative act.  A will use the hands or the cheating in accordance with her broad purposes.  Secondly, the argument is bound to be tacit  From the nature of the case, A can never say in her ‘if’-sentence how the temporal gap is to be bridged between premisses and conclusion in her underlying argument.  She can make expectations explicit, certainly, and imagine them fulfilled:

	. . . if the hands remain unchanged from now until then . . .

But which way she will argue remains as enigmatic as before.  If someone says

	If Sly Pete calls with the hands as they are now, he will win

for example, A will dissent or not depending as she uses the hands or the cheating.
    (To B, meanwhile, the natural interpretation of ‘If Sly Pete calls with the hands as they are now he will lose’ has the ring of an inescapable truth.  But only because she is using the hands, and that only because she can think of nothing else to use.  In real life there would be more for her to conjure with.)
    Let us go back to before the expulsion.  All of a sudden, with A in the middle of affirming m1 ‘with full justification’, Sly Pete is shot dead before her very eyes. As a matter of observation, she meets this crisis by saying (3) instead of (1).  And presumably with the same full justification.  At this stage the calling and winning are still future; but if she reiterates (3) periodically she will eventually assert it with the imagined all and win indisputably past.  And still with the same justification.  Now, is the message thus recurrently affirmed our familiar m3?  In my design, certainly; what Jackson calls “past subjunctives” need not be about the past.  But Jackson can expect trouble whichever way he answers.
    After the shooting, (3) provides A with means of making the same point she was formerly making with (1).  If she tried to go on making it with (1) she would find herself now talking about a deceased Sly Pete calling and winning, something remote from her original plan.  By switching to (3), A evidently retreats to a time before Sly Pete’s assassination, a time when Sly Pete was actually still alive, so that she can then imagine him staying alive right into the future, ready for a live Sly Pete to call.  It is thus that she is able to resume her original point, which concerned a live Sly Pete calling.  As before, then, we find m1 arrived at on the basis of how things are now and m3 on the basis of how they were in the past past, but both by the same line of argument.
    So when A is reacting to m1 or m3, apparently all that is betokened by the formal differences between (1) and (3) is a difference in the temporal location of the facts that her underlying reasoning goes to work on.  But if m1 and m3 are as like as that then they ought to be classified together, not apart. – Which brings me back to the first of the two things I promised at the start.  Time to sum up.
    First, evident similarities between m1 and m3 strain the credibility of any taxonomy which would separate “past subjunctives” from “future indicatives”.  Secondly, an essential indeterminacy is going to frustrate every attempt to evaluate these messages as if they were claims of fact.  Truth conditions, for example, are out of the question.

REFERENCES

[1]    V.H. Dudman, ‘Conditional Interpretations of ‘If’-sentences’, Australian Journal of Linguistics 4
         (1984) 143-204.
[2]    V.H. Dudman, ‘Interpretations of ‘If’-sentences’, in Conditionals, edited by Frank Jackson
         (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
[3]    Allan Gibbard, ‘Two recent Theories of Conditionals’, in Ifs, edited by W.L Harper et. al.
         (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1981), 153-90.
[4]    Michael Pendlebury, ‘The Projection Strategy and the Truth of Conditional Statements’, Mind 98
         (1989) 179-205.