Kenneth Black

In conversation, we make use of shared information in order to communicate. But what shared information? In theorising about conversation, it’s popular to allot a privileged position to a single body of information: the common ground (roughly, what all participants in a conversation take for granted). I argue that we need a more nuanced view—a single body of information is not enough to characterise how conversation works. As proof of concept, I focus on indicative conditionals. Orthodoxy holds that indicative conditionals are felicitous only when their antecedents are compatible with the common ground. I marshal linguistic data to show this can’t be right. Instead, different conversational goals may impose different constraints on the use of indicative conditionals. Nevertheless, I argue that the orthodox constraint on indicative conditionals may be ceteris paribus true, with violations to be explained on a case-by-case basis, and defend this kind of approach to pragmatics.