Conditionals and Information Transfer

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The goal of the renewal project Conditionals and Information Transfer is both to address two questions from the first phase that have remained partially unanswered (Part 1) and to tie the responses with a complex of questions on the information transfer effected by conditionals (Part 2). This second complex of questions and issues has not yet been explored during the first project phase.The first sub-goal of Part 1 consists in checking the accuracy of two important hypotheses about the philosophically contested truth-evaluability of conditionals: the hypothesis that the truth conditions of conditionals are given by the background assumptions on which the acceptance of the conditional rests, and the further hypothesis that the conditional relation itself is truth-evaluable to the extent described by the objectification theory for ranking functions.The second sub-goal is closely related to the issue of truth-evaluablity. It consists in investigating the syntactic and semantic conditions under which conditionals can be embedded in logically complex sentences (in close cooperation with the linguistic projects P2 and P8). It harks back to the observation that conditionals cannot be felicitously embedded under connectives like "or" or even as the antecedent of a more complex conditional.The exploration of these open questions from the first phase will be complemented, in Part 2, by a broad array of questions concerning the information transfer "facilitated" by conditionals. This array will be organized as follows:The first question to be addressed is whether a hearer processes conditional information the same way in which she processes factual information. There is evidence that the dynamics of forming new beliefs and changing degrees of existing beliefs differs when the input is a conditional belief, but the nature of the impact of conditional beliefs on a given body of beliefs is unclear and yet to be investigated.Second, building on the result of this prior investigation possible ways of translating the processing of conditional information into an algorithm shall be explored, with the hope that this knowledge can be put to use in the design of artificially intelligent agents. Ideally, one could build robots, feed them certain bits of conditional information and observe how this affects the way in which they carry out their tasks.Third, there will be research on the impact conditional information has on the common ground, which is the space of assumptions the parties to a conversation make for the sake of their conversation. Depending on the previous results, our conception of the common ground will have to be altered or enriched. E.g., it is an open question whether the common ground should also contain probabilistic information. Fine-tuning a philosophically more satisfying conception of the common ground and integrating that conception with a dynamic or update semantics for conditionals is going to constitute the project`s conclusion.