On Indicative and Subjunctive Conditionals
Name
on-indicative-and-subjunctive-conditionals.pdf
Size
397.46 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
b122dcf497a430019c9f0b508ffe2277
Author(s)
Khoo, Justin Donald
Date Issued
December 2015
Journal
Philosophers' Imprint
Publisher
Michigan Publishing
Citation
Khoo, Justin. "On Indicative and Subjunctive Conditionals." Philosophers' Imprint, vol. 15, no. 32, December 2015, pp. 1-40.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
At the center of the literature on conditionals lies the division between indicative and subjunctive conditionals, and Ernest Adams’ famous minimal pair: (1) If Oswald didn’t shoot Kennedy, someone else did. (2) If Oswald hadn’t shot Kennedy, someone else would have. While a lot of attention is paid to figuring out what these different kinds of conditionals mean, significantly less attention has been paid to the question of why their grammatical differences give rise to their semantic differences. In this paper, I articulate and defend an answer to this question that illuminates and unifies the meanings of both kinds of conditionals. The basic idea is that epistemic and metaphysical possibilities differ with respect to their interaction with time, such that there can be present epistemic possibilities with different pasts, while present metaphysical possibilities share the same past. The interpretation of conditionals is subject to a pragmatic constraint that rules out interpretations in which their consequents are directly settled by information used to build their domains. The past + future morphology on subjunctives, but not indicatives, is what allows them to receive a metaphysical interpretation in light of this pragmatic constraint. The resulting theory predicts several surprising features of indicatives and subjunctives, which I argue are correct.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
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DOI of Published Version
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/phimp/3521354.0015.032/1
