Austin's lecture on this topic contributes little to the problem of freedom of the will, and so in my discussion of his ideas I shall stop short of the difficult part of that problem. His most important positive suggestion is that hypotheticals should be divided into two classes, conditionals and pseudo-conditionals. He claims that neglect of this distinction has been the cause of mistakes in certain forms of the dispositional analysis of the statement that an agent could have acted otherwise, (...) and he then goes on to criticise all forms of that analysis using arguments which do not depend on the difference between the two kinds of hypothetical.This discussion will be in two parts. In the first I shall take up Austin's distinction between conditionals and pseudos and criticise it and develop it at length, because it seems to me to be the most important thing in his lecture. Since I shall not have space for comment on fortuitous errors made by defenders of the dispositional analysis of the claim that an agent could have acted otherwise, I shall concentrate on the essential features of that analysis. (shrink)