Commentary on: Andrei Moldovan's "Denying the antecedent and conditional perfection again"

Moldovan's paper discusses a model called the "Horn scale," which is intended to illuminate the way that Gricean implicature may perfect a conditional statement, "if p, q," into a biconditional statement, "if and only if p, then q."He addresses various objections to this scale.I find his replies to these objections quite reasonable, although sometimes I find the objections themselves obscure.My feeling, when I look at the Horn Scale, is that the objections he is considering are just the tip of the iceberg: that a lot more objections will come from where those objections are coming from.The reason is that I am reminded of my undergraduate days at Wayne State.I was known in the department as a great counterexampler: people would give me a definition; I would give a counterexample.I was able to do this because I knew Nelson Goodman's Secret: namely, that analytic philosophers have two different notions of logical form: the narrow official notion and the secret robust notion.The official notion does not allow us to distinguish between disjunctive and nondisjunctive propositions, negative and positive propositions, relational properties and non-relational ones, and implicational propositions and non-implicational ones; any given proposition can be written in so many different forms.But we secretly believe-though claiming not to-in a more robust concept, one that allows us to make all of these distinctions.So, when we give a definition, our definition presupposes the robust concept.So it is easy for someone-me-to do a few truth table manipulations and give a counterexample-a Goodman grue-bleen type example-that cannot be answered except by confessing you accept the robust concept.Moldovan's problems are already of this sort to a large extent, and when I look at Horn's Scale, I expect many more such problems to start popping off the wallpaper!Now Horn's Scale supposes we are in a situation where someone wants information about the conditions x such that if x then q, the conditions which imply q.So if there is just one, we say, "if p then q"; if there are two, we say, "if p then q, and "if r then q."If there are three, we say, "if p then q," "if r then q," and "if s then q."And so forth.

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