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Updated: Jan 31, 2026

Mouse Kidney Transplantation: Models of Allograft Rejection
Published on: October 11, 2014
Cancellation, negation, and rejection
Niels Skovgaard-Olsen1, Peter Collins2, Karolina Krzyżanowska3
1Department of Cognition and Decision Making, University of Göttingen, Germany.
Abstract:
In this paper, new evidence is presented for the assumption that the reason-relation reading of indicative conditionals ('if A, then C') reflects a conventional implicature. In four experiments, it is investigated whether relevance effects found for the probability assessment of indicative conditionals (Skovgaard-Olsen, Singmann, & Klauer, 2016a) can be classified as being produced by (a) a conversational implicature, (b) a (probabilistic) presupposition failure, or (c) a conventional implicature. After considering several alternative hypotheses, and the accumulating evidence from other studies as well, we conclude that the evidence is most consistent with the Relevance Effect being the outcome of a conventional implicature. This finding indicates that the reason-relation reading is part of the semantic content of indicative conditionals, albeit not part of their primary truth-conditional content.
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