Against Philo’s interpretation of conditional. The case of Aristotle´s thesis

Abstract

There is an Aristotelian thesis that can be considered controversial. That is the thesis related to a denied conditional with only one propositional variable and in which, in addition, one of its clauses is also denied. While the thesis is not a tautology, people tend to accept it as true. Pfeifer’s approach can account for this fact. However, I try to show that this problem can also be explained from other alternative frameworks, in particular, from that of the mental models theory, that of López-Astorga based on the pragmatic phenomenon of conditional perfection, and that of the mental logic theory. Likewise, I indicate the difficulties regarding Aristotle’s thesis of the mental models theory and López-Astorga’s proposal, and conclude that the account of the mental logic theory is the strongest alternative to Pfeifer’s explanation and that what is clearly obvious is that conditional should not be materially interpreted.

http://dx.doi.org/10.15304/ag.35.2.2542