Iffiness

Abstract

How do ordinary indicative conditionals manage to convey conditional information, information about what might or must be if such-and-such is or turns out to be the case? An old school thesis is that they do this by expressing something iffy: ordinary indicatives express a two-place conditional operator and that is how they convey conditional information. How indicatives interact with epistemic modals seems to be an argument against iffiness and for the new school thesis that "if"-clauses are merely devices for restricting the domains of other operators. I will make the trouble both clear and general, and then explore a way out for fans of iffiness.

doi:10.3765/sp.3.4

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