The idea that english has more than one declarative "mood" has been dismissed as superstitious by empirically-minded grammarians of english for centuries--with such spectacular unsuccess, however, that the indicative/subjunctive dichotomy stands today as a cornerstone for philosophical and logical speculation about "conditionals." let me be next into the breach. i shall urge that there is no grammatical basis for any such distinction. and as for the particular adjudications of mood logicians and philosophers actually propose, there is neither rhyme nor reason (...) to them. my bent, then, is basically destructive. but i shall also be outlining a better taxonomy. (shrink)

Drawing on Stalnaker’s projection strategy, a revised version of the Ramsey test, and Dudman’s account of the evaluation of projective conditionals (e.g., “If Hitler invades England, Germany will win the war” and “If Hitler had invaded England, Germany would have won the war”), I offer a novel truth-conditional account of the semantics of a range of English conditionals. This account resolves some key puzzles in the philosophical literature about semantic differences between maximally similar conditionals of different types (including some parallel (...) indicative and subjunctive conditionals) without assuming that the word “if” is ambiguous. It does so by explaining these semantic differences on the basis of semantic properties of the clauses combined by “if” and temporal factors arising from these properties. (shrink)

The title alone of McCall’s book reveals its ambitious enterprise. The book’s structure is a long inference to the best explanation: chapters present problems that are solved by a single, ontological model. Problems as diverse as time flow, quantum measurement, counterfactual semantics, and free will are discussed. McCall’s style of writing is lucid and pointed—in general, very pleasant to read.