Professor Ed Mares (Wellington) ` Entailment and other Conditionals'

In the 1960s, Paul Grice developed a theory of the indicative conditional according to which ‘if … then’ is to be understood as expressing the material conditional of classical logic, but that the apparent paradoxes of the material conditional are to be understood in terms of his theory of implicature. In the 1970s, Grice started to develop a very similar theory of entailment, according to which to say ‘A entails B’ means that A strictly implies B (in the sense of classical modal logic) and the paradoxes of strict implication are treated pragmatically. There is an implicature (in standard cases) which avoids the paradoxes. This theory of entailment has remained virtually unknown and Grice’s manuscripts that present it were until now buried in the archives at Berkeley. In this paper I present Grice’s view, fill in several gaps, and show that it has some interesting properties.