Friday, October 8, 2010
Conditionals
One of the new concepts I learned about are conditionals. According to Epstein, a conditional claim is when a claim can be rewritten as an "if...then.." claim and must also have the same truth-value. In a "If A, then B" the A is known as the antecedent and B is known as the consequent. An example of a conditional claim is "If the Lakers win the game, then I will give you twenty dollars" This is conditional because if I'm making a conditional promise, but if I break the promise it then I won't give the money. The antecedent of the claim is "If the Lakers win the game" and the consequent is "I will give you twenty dollars". There is also contradictory of a conditional in which if A then B would contradict A. An example of a contradictory of a conditional would be " If we win, they would lose all their money". The contradictory of this would be "Although we win, they would lose some of their money". Since I added "although" it does not make the claim a conditional anymore.
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I completely agree with you about your explanation of conditional claims and I enjoyed reading about the examples you gave because they relate to the conditional claims I have witnessed.
ReplyDeleteDuring the World Cup of Soccer, my uncle was positive that Spain was going to win against Netherlands. So he made a conditional claim with me regarding the World Cup.
Conditional: "If the Netherlands wins, I will give you two free movie tickets."
This is a conditional claim because my uncle has not really promised that he will give me the movie tickets. This will only happen IF the Netherlands win the world cup, which was unpredictable and not guaranteed.