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Research project The project aims to understand thoughts expressed by sentences of the form "If P, Q". The question is how these can express a range of radically different but yet strongly constrained relations between P and Q.
Conditional sentences of the form "If P, Q" can express a range of relations: relations of (causal, epistemic, logical, etc) consequence, of independence, and of relevance between P and Q, but also relations between speech acts performed by expressing P and Q ("He didn't do it, if you wonder"). At the same time, most relations that can hold between P and Q cannot be expressed by such sentences. The project aims at understanding this phenomenon, and the thoughts expressed by different conditionals, based on the observation that various pragmatic factors affect what relation a given condition is taken to express in a given situation.