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dc.contributor.authorvon Fintel, Kai
dc.date.accessioned2015-03-04T14:01:59Z
dc.date.available2015-03-04T14:01:59Z
dc.date.issued2012
dc.identifier.isbn978-0-415-99310-4
dc.identifier.isbn978-1-13-877618-0
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/95784
dc.description.abstractConditional sentences, canonically of the form "if p, q", whisk us away to a scenario described by their antecedent and then make a claim about it in the consequent. There are two main kinds of conditionals, as illustrated in the well-known Oswald/Kennedy minimal pair (due to Adams 1970): (1) If Oswald didn't kill Kennedy, somebody else did. (2) If Oswald hadn't killed Kennedy, someone else would have. Clearly, the two conditionals differ in meaning. The conditional in (1) signals that it is an open possibility that Oswald didn't kill Kennedy and will be judged true by anyone who knows that Kennedy was in fact assassinated. The conditional in (2), in contrast, signals that it is taken for granted that Oswald did in fact kill Kennedy and makes the somewhat dubious claim that Kennedy's assassination was inevitable, perhaps based on a vast conspiracy. The same difference in meaning can be illustrated with a similar pair (due to Bennett or Stalnaker?), where it is even harder to hear the second conditional as making a plausible claim: (3) If Shakespeare didn't write Hamlet, someone else did. (4) If Shakespeare hadn't written Hamlet, someone else would have. This chapter will be concerned with the meaning of conditionals of the second kind.en_US
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.publisherRoutledgeen_US
dc.relation.isversionofhttp://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415993104/en_US
dc.rightsCreative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alikeen_US
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/en_US
dc.sourceVon Fintelen_US
dc.titleSubjunctive conditionalsen_US
dc.typeArticleen_US
dc.identifier.citationvon Fintel, Kai. 2012. Subjunctive conditionals. In Gillian Russell and Delia Graff Fara (Eds.), The Routledge companion to philosophy of language, 466-477. New York: Routledge.en_US
dc.contributor.departmentMassachusetts Institute of Technology. School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciencesen_US
dc.contributor.approvervon Fintel, Kaien_US
dc.contributor.mitauthorvon Fintel, Kaien_US
dc.relation.journalThe Routledge companion to philosophy of languageen_US
dc.eprint.versionAuthor's final manuscripten_US
dc.type.urihttp://purl.org/eprint/type/BookItemen_US
eprint.statushttp://purl.org/eprint/status/NonPeerRevieweden_US
dspace.orderedauthorsvon Fintel, Kaien_US
dc.identifier.orcidhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-7912-4246
mit.licenseOPEN_ACCESS_POLICYen_US
mit.metadata.statusComplete


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