Abstract
Two key questions that have plagued philosophical and linguistic debates on the meanings of conditionals are: (i) do conditionals have truth conditions? And if so, (ii) what are these truth conditions? This chapter begins by revisiting familiar arguments against the material conditional as a psychologically plausible basis for the semantics of conditionals. It also defends the assumption that conditionals lend themselves to a truth-conditional treatment, thus rejecting the no-truth value account of conditionals, arguing against those views that combat the psychological plausibility of applying truth conditions to counterfactual conditionals. It then moves to current mainstream views on the semantics of conditionals, including the more philosophically-oriented Lewis-Stalnaker truth conditions using possible-worlds semantics, and the view most dominantly followed in linguistics, the ‘restrictor view’ from Kratzer. It settles on adopting Stalnakerian truth conditions for their flexibility in operating at different levels of representation, before finishing by reflecting on the scope of analysis of each of the main contenders.
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