abstractThis paper studies two types of cognitive factors which have been assumed to underpin people’s interpretation of conditional promises and threats: logic and socio-cognitive assumptions about what conditional promisors and threateners are obliged and permitted to do. We consider whether the logic of conditionals is compatible with the socio-cognitive assumptions underlying their interpretation or whether the two come apart. From the classical logical accounts of conditionals, almost all modern theories have inherited a constraint which specifies that a conditional cannot be true if its antecedent is true and consequent false. This logical constraint is widely assumed to constitute, at least partially, a conditional’s semantics, or ‘core meaning’. A replication of Beller et al.’s (2005) study, reported in this paper, calls for revisiting this long-standing, cross-theoretically assumed constraint. As predicted, we have found that, in English, conditional promises are generally consistent with this logical constraint, but threats are not. Our findings provide evidence for the existence of a new usage-based category of conditional threats, and support the claim that the observed logical asymmetry in the interpretation of conditional promises versus threats is just an epiphenomenon of a socio-cognitive symmetry which pertains to people’s assumptions about the deontic commitments of both conditional promisors and threateners. Based on (i) the observed lack of uniform application of the logical constraint and (ii) a consideration of individual variation in the interpretation of conditional promises and threats, we argue that an exemplar approach to conditionals is a plausible option.

中文翻译：

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有条件的承诺和威胁中的道义承诺：走向条件句的典型语义

摘要本文研究了两种类型的认知因素，它们被假定为支持人们对有条件的承诺和威胁的解释：关于有条件的承诺者和威胁者有义务和允许做什么的逻辑和社会认知假设。我们考虑条件句的逻辑是否与其解释背后的社会认知假设兼容，或者两者是否分开。从条件句的经典逻辑解释来看，几乎所有现代理论都继承了一个约束条件，即如果条件的前件为真而后件为假，则该条件不能为真。这种逻辑约束被广泛认为至少部分地构成了条件的语义或“核心含义”。本文报道的 Beller 等人 (2005) 研究的复制品，呼吁重新审视这个长期存在的、跨理论假设的约束。正如预测的那样，我们发现，在英语中，有条件的承诺通常与这种逻辑约束一致，但威胁则不然。我们的研究结果为存在一种新的基于使用的条件威胁类别提供了证据，并支持这样一种说法，即在条件承诺与威胁的解释中观察到的逻辑不对称只是与人们的假设有关的社会认知对称的附带现象关于有条件的承诺者和威胁者的义务承诺。基于 (i) 观察到缺乏统一应用逻辑约束和 (ii) 在解释有条件的承诺和威胁时考虑到个体差异，