Conditionals

Conditional information is a useful kind of information and it is no surprise that natural language has canonical ways of expressing it. Theories of conditionals are constrained by the patterns of intuitive entailment they participate in. The material conditional is extreme in its myopia: only how things are at w matter to the truth of a material conditional at w. At the other end of the spectrum lie strict conditionals: these survey all possibilities. A strict conditional is a universal quantifier, saying that all the if-relevant possibilities at which the antecedent is true are possibilities at which the consequent true. The classic account of counterfactuals, and by far the account that remains dominant, treats them as variably strict conditionals. Conditionals presuppose that their antecedents are compatible with the relevant domain that the conditionals talk about. So counterfactuals presuppose that their antecedents are compatible with the counterfactual domain.