Counterfactual promises and threats

Abstract

We examine counterfactual conditionals about promises, such as ‘if you had tidied your room then I would have given you ice-cream’ and threats such as ‘if you had hit your sister then I would have grounded you’. Reasoners tend to understand counterfactual conditionals of the form, ‘if A had been then B would have been’ by thinking about the conjectured possibility, ‘A and B', and also the presupposed facts ‘not-A and not-B’. We report the results of an experiment that indicates reasoners may understand counterfactual inducements somewhat differently by thinking about just the presupposed facts: not-A and not-B. We discuss the implications of the results for accounts of the mental representations of promises and threats.