Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

ndicative conditionals, that is sentences of the form “If p, thenq,” belong to the most puzzling phenomena of language. Onthe majority of accounts of indicative conditionals, the truth ofp and q suffices for “If p, then q” to be true or highly accept-able. Yet, many conditionals with true clauses, even if there isa meaningful connection between them, sound odd. The mostcommon reaction to this phenomenon is to attribute the oddityof conditionals with true clauses to natural language pragmat-ics. We present an experimental study investigating how thepresence or absence of a connection between the clauses af-fects the assertability of conditionals and conjunction express-ing generic and specific kind of content. The results refute thestandard pragmatic explanation.