Discourse Rationality and the Counterfactuality Implicature in Backtracking Conditionals

Abstract

This paper contributes to current discussions of counterfactuality implicatures in would-conditionals. The empirical focus is on the contrast between forward looking and backtracking examples in Anderson-style ‘detective reasoning’ sequences. We show that differences regarding the cancellability of counterfactuality in these examples follow from general principles of discourse rationality and can be extended to provide a more general account of the cancellability of counterfactuality implicatures (e.g. in future-shifted examples).