Suppose and Tell

Suppose and Tell: The Semantics and Heuristics of Conditionals investigates how speakers understand and reason with conditional thought. Published as a book by Timothy Williamson, the volume combines research across philosophy, linguistics, and psychology to address longstanding debates over the meaning of conditionals.

The text examines how everyday cognition relies on fast and frugal psychological heuristics when interpreting the word "if". Williamson argues that theorists have often been misled by trusting faulty heuristic data, causing them to reject simple theories of conditionals because of merely apparent counterexamples.

Coverage encompasses the suppositional rule, conditional testimony, and the interaction of conditionals with quantifiers, as well as the semantics and logic governing the relationship between "if" and "would".