Biscuits and provisos: Providing unconditional information by conditional means

Abstract

Independence-based accounts of biscuit conditionals and the proviso problem are attractive due to their parsimony. This paper spells out the semantic and pragmatic background assumptions underlying such accounts, and raises the issue whether they can be adopted for both phenomena jointly. At first blush, the answer is clearly negative, but there is hope for reconciliation, once an independent Gricean factor is taken into account.