"I can if I choose to"

Austin ponders the peculiarities of this conditional in "Ifs and Cans." It fails to allow contraposition. It does allow an inference to the apodosis, and to "I can whether or not I choose to." In short, it declines to behave like an ordinary sufficient condition/causal conditional in which the antecedent guaranteees the consequence. So what's going on? Is this some deviant usage that needs to be diagnosed and treated with a healthy dose of grammar? What does this case tell us about the English conditional?

Nothing profound, I believe, or even puzzling. Like many other utterances in ordinary language it is compressed and elliptical usage. Logicians, focused only the words uttered, miss the rest. Logic is like studying icebergs: if we look only at the words spoken, we will miss most of the meaning.

I ask a neighbor, who has a very long drive to clear of snow, "can you get that cleared this morning?" He replies, "I can if I choose to." What has he said to me? Has he said or implied something pretty strange: that his ability to clear the snow quickly depends on choice to do so? No one, I think, takes it in this sense. He asserted, first of all, that he can clear it . He has the ability, he is able. His tone of voice supports his claim of ability. He could have belabored his point with " I can do, don't doubt that for a minute, but that is IF I choose to." But that expansion is unnecessary. He is saying, plainly enough, that it is his actual performance, not his ability to perform the task, that remains in question.

He is telling me, secondly, that he wasn't yet decide to tackle the task. If does, I can be sure, he will get it done this morning. But the decision is not yet made. He could said less elliptically, " I can, and I shall if I chose to." But this conditionality is well enough understood by his listener in the shorter form of the utterance. No one thinks he saying that his choice will suddenly create an ability that is otherwise in doubt. This would be a bizarre claim in the circumstances, would it not? So we discount it. But his actually doing what he is able to do is not unconnected to his choice to act. I have the ability, he is saying, and I choose to it, it will get done.

Ordinary speakers are naturally economical in the form of expression they use. Needless words and phrases get dropped because we do not need them to understand the speaker's meaning. But logicians come along and forget this, and look at "I can if I choose to" and think it a great puzzle. It isn't. It is compressed idiom, like much of natural speech, in which an unnecessary and understood clause ( "and I shall" ) is left unspoken. Put it back in, and all of the logical puzzles go away.