Zif Would Have Been If: A Suppositional View of Counterfactuals

Let us call a statement of the form ‘If A was, is, or will be the case, then C was, is, or will be the case’ an indicative conditional. And let us call a statement of the form ‘If A had been, were, or were to be the case, then C would have been, would be, or would come to be the case’ a subjunctive, or counterfactual, conditional. On standard views, all conditionals are interpreted as categorical statements: to state that, if A, then C, is to state something, not relative to any hypothesis or supposition, but categorically. Disagreement among the standard views is disagreement over which thing is categorically stated by a conditional. For indicatives, H.P. Grice (1967), David Lewis (1976), and Frank Jackson (1979) say that it is the material conditional—that is, the disjunction of the negation of the antecedent with the consequent; Robert Stalnaker (1968) says that it is a predication of a single possible world. For subjunctives, Nelson Goodman (1947) says that it is an entailment from the antecedent, together with laws of nature and particular facts about the actual world, to the consequent; Stalnaker (1968) again says that it is a predication of a single possible world; and Lewis (1973) says that it is an existential generalization over a set of possible worlds. By contrast, W.V.O. Quine (1950), John Mackie (1973), Michael Dummett (1978), Dorothy Edgington (1995), and I (2006, forthcoming) maintain that conditionals are as their surface form suggests: