Dialogue

Table of Contents - 1992 - Volume 31, Issue 02  

Critical Notices/Études critiques

Struggling With Conditionals*

Bryson Browna1

a1 University of Lethbridge

David Sanford's If P, Then Q is an ambitious book, aimed at two difficult tasks and addressed to two audiences. It combines a survey of historical and contemporary work on-conditionals with a presentation-of, Sanford's personal views. And it is addressed to both undergraduate students, without, logical training, and professionals seriously interested in conditionals. It is marred by the impossibility of achieving both aims in a book this size, and by the strains of simultaneously addressing audiences with such different needs and interests.

Footnotes

* David H. Sanford, If P, Then Q: Conditionals and the Foundations of Reasoning (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), ix + 265 p. Page references are to this work. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and to the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh for support during the time in which this work was done.