Abstract

According to a study carried out by Quelhas, Rasga, and Johnson-Laird in 2017, it seems that people tend not to understand false conditionals in the way expected by standard logic, that is, following the material interpretation of the conditional. In their paper, among other types of sentences, they used a priori false conditionals and the responses given by their participants appeared to suggest that, when considering conditionals of that kind, individuals often think about possibilities or scenarios other than those that classical logic regards as the correct ones when a conditional is negated. However, I try to argue here that such responses did not really reveal that the way their participants denied the conditionals included in the study cannot be captured by classical logic, but only that the logical forms of such denied sentences do not correspond to the one of the conditional, as well as the actual formal structures relating their antecedents and their consequents that can be built. To do that, I resort to a methodology similar to that of López-Astorga in previous works.