Connectives: Order, causality and beyond

Abstract

It is often pointed out that different so-called causal connectives have different causal orders associated with them, for instance non-iconic (consequence-cause) for because, iconic (cause-consequence) for so and and. The objective of this contribution is to determine whether this phenomenological observation has some deeper theoretical explanation by examining what the order really refers to beyond causality. The hypothesis put forward is that the order imposed by connectives does not pertain to causes and consequences as it is usually assumed but to the order of implication (antecedent-consequent) induced by laws, in the sense of non-accidental generalizations. It will be demonstrated that in the case of connectives, laws have the function of the contextual assumptions tacitly invoked as premises in the reasonings that speakers perform when using utterances with connectives such as because, so and, in some cases, and.