Indicatives and Subjunctives

Brian Weatherson

This paper presents a new theory of the truth conditions for indicative conditionals.
The theory allows us to give a fairly unified account of the semantics for indicative
and subjunctive conditionals, though there remains a distinction between the two
classes. Put simply, the idea behind the theory is that the distinction between the
indicative and the subjunctive parallels the distinction between the necessary and the
a priori. Since that distinction is best understood formally using the resources of
two-dimensional modal logic, those resources will be brought to bear on the logic of
conditionals.

1 A Grand Unified Theory?

Our primary focus is the indicative conditional ‘If A, B’, written as A → B. Most the-
orists fail to distinguish between this conditional and ‘If A, then B’, and for the most
part I will follow this tradition. The most notable philosophical exception is Grice,
who suggested that only the latter says that B follows from A in some relevant way
(1989: 63). Theorists do distinguish between this conditional and the subjunctive ‘If
it were the case that A, it would be the case that B’, written as A € B. There is
some debate about precisely where to draw the line between these two classes, which
I’ll discuss in section three, but for now I’ll focus on cases far from the borderline.
One important tradition in work on conditionals holds that the semantics of indica-
tives differs radically from the semantics of subjunctives. According to David Lewis
(1973, 1976) and Frank Jackson (1987) for example, indicatives are truth-functional,
but subjunctives are not. This makes a mystery of some of the data. For example, as
Jackson himself writes:

Before the last presidential election commentators said ‘If Reagan loses,
the opinion polls will be totally discredited’, afterwards they said ‘If Rea-
gan had lost, the opinion polls would have been totally discredited’, and
this switch from indicative to subjunctive counterfactual did not count
as a change of mind (Jackson, 1987, 66).

The point can be pushed further. To communicate the commentators’ pre-election

opinions using indirect speech we would say something like (1).

(1) Commentators have said that if Reagan were to lose the opinion polls would
be totally discredited.
† Penultimate draft only. Please cite published version if possible. Final version published in Philo-

sophical Quarterly 51 (2001): 200-216. Thanks to Stephen Barker, John Bigelow, Richard Holton, Lloyd
Humberstone, Frank Jackson, Europa Malynicz, Daniel Nolan, Graham Oppy, Ted Sider and an anony-
mous referee for Philosophical Quarterly for helpful comments and suggestions.
Indicatives and Subjunctives 2

Yet it is possible on Jackson’s view that what the commentators said was true, since
Reagan won, yet the words after ‘that’ in (1) form a false sentence. So we can accu-
rately report someone speaking truly by using a false sentence. Jackson’s response
plays on the connections between A → B and the disjunction ‘Not-A or B’. That dis-
junction has undeniably different truth conditions to A € B. Pushing the truth con-
ditions of A → B closer to those of A € B will move them away from ‘Not- A or B’.
One gain in similarity and theoretical simplicity is bought at the cost of another.
Jackson’s account, by making A → B have similar truth conditions to ‘Not - A or B’
but similar assertibility conditions to A € B, tries to have the best of both worlds.
How great the similarity between indicative conditionals and disjunctions really is,
and hence how great the cost of linking indicatives and subjunctives, might well be
questioned. After all, we don’t report an utterance of an indicative using a disjunc-
tion.
Two types of cases seem to threaten the success of a unified theory. First, rigid-
ifying expressions like ‘actually’ behave differently in indicatives and subjunctives.
Secondly, some conditionals differ in intuitive truth value when we transpose them
from the indicative to the subjunctive. The most famous examples of this phenome-
non involve various presidential assassinations. The effects of rigidity on conditionals
are less explored, so we will first look at that. Consider the following example, from
page 55 of Naming and Necessity.

(2) If heat had been applied to this stick S at t0 , then at t0 stick S would not have
been one meter long.

The background is that we have stipulated that a metre is the length of stick S at time
t0 . (2) contrasts with (3), which seems false.

(3) If heat was applied to this stick S at t0 , then at t0 stick S was not one meter
long.

If we have stipulated that to be a meter long is to be the length of S at t0 , then what-

ever conditions S was under at t0 , it was one meter long. As Jackson points out, we
can get the same effect with explicit rigidifiers like ‘actually’. We could, somewhat
wistfully, say (4). It may even be true. But (5) seems barely coherent, and certainly
not something we could ever say.

(4) If Hillary Clinton were to become the next U.S. President, things would be
different from the way they actually will be.
(5) If Hillary Clinton becomes the next U.S. President, things will be different
from the way they actually will be.

It looks like any theory of conditionals will have to account for a difference between
the behaviour of rigid designators in indicatives and subjunctives. We may avoid the
conclusion by showing that the difference only appears in certain types of condition-
als, and we already have an explanation for those cases. For example, it is well known
that usually one cannot say A → B if it is known that not-A. As Dudman (1994)
points out, (6) is clearly infelicitous on its most obvious reading.
Indicatives and Subjunctives 3

(6) *Granny won, but if she lost she was furious.

To complete the diagnosis, note that the most striking examples of the different be-
haviour of rigid designators in different types of conditionals comes up in cases where
the antecedent is almost certainly false. The effect is that the subjunctive can be as-
serted, but not the indicative. So this phenomenon may be explainable by some
other part of the theory of conditionals.1 These are the most striking exemplars of
the difference I am highlighting, but not the only examples. Hence, this point can-
not explain all the data, though it may explain why pairs like (2)/(3) and (4)/(5) are
striking. For instance, in the following pairs, the indicative seems appropriate and
intuitively true, and the subjunctive seems inappropriate and intuitively false.

(7) If C-fibres firing is what causes pain sensations, then C-fibres firing is what
actually causes pain sensations.
(8) If C-fibres firing were what caused pain sensations, then C-fibres firing would
be what actually causes pain sensations.
(9) If the stuff that plays the gold role has atomic number 42, then gold has atomic
number 42.
(10) If the stuff that played the gold role had atomic number 42, gold would have
atomic number 42.

In (9) and (10) I assume that to play the gold role one must play it throughout a large
part of the world, and not just on a small stage. Something may play the gold role in
a small part of the world without being gold. Since there are pairs of conditionals like
these where the indicative is appropriate, but the subjunctive is not, the explanation
of the behaviour of rigid terms cannot rely on the fact that the antecedents of indica-
tives must be not known to be false. We will also need a more traditional example of
the differences between indicatives and subjunctives, as in (11) and (12).

(11) If Hinckley didn’t shoot Reagan, someone else did.

(12) If Hinckley hadn’t shot Reagan, someone else would have.

I have concentrated on the examples involving rigidity because they seem to pose a
deeper problem for unifying the theory of conditionals than the presidential exam-
ples. As Jackson (1987, 75) points out, one can presumably explain (11) and (12) on
a possible worlds account by varying the similarity metric between indicatives and
subjunctives, or on a probabilistic account by varying the background evidence. It is
unclear, however, how this will help with the rigidity examples. Assume, for exam-
ple, that C-fibres firing is not what causes pain sensations. Still, (7) seems true, but
its consequent is false in all possible worlds. Therefore, the nearest world in which
its antecedent is true is a world in which its consequent is false, and on a simple pos-
sible worlds theory it should turn out false. On a simple probabilistic account, the
probability that C-fibres firing actually cause pain sensations given that they do is
1, whatever the background evidence, so (8) should turn out true, contrary to our
1 An anonymous reviewer for Philosophical Quarterly suggested this point.
Indicatives and Subjunctives 4

intuitions. So while the details deal with the presidential examples, the structure of
the theory must deal with the rigidity examples.
I will follow that strategy here. In section two I set out the framework of a unified
possible worlds account of indicatives and subjunctives. In section three I present my
preferred way of filling out the details of that framework. The framework deals with
the differing behaviour of rigid designators in indicatives and subjunctives; the details
deal with examples like (11) and (12). One reason for dividing the presentation in this
way is to highlight the option of accepting the framework and filling in the details in
different ways.

2 The New Theory

2.1 Actually
As Kripke (1980) showed, the reference for some terms is fixed by what plays a par-
ticular role in the actual world. Even if it were the case that XYZ fills the ocean, falls
from the sky, is drinkable and transparent and so on, for short is watery, it would
still be the case that water is H2 O, not XYZ. For it would still be that H2 O actually
is watery. Whatever were the case, this world would be actual.
Yet, we want to have a way to talk about what would have happened had some
other world been actual. In particular, had the actual world been one in which XYZ is
watery, it would be true, indeed necessarily true, that water is XYZ. Throughout the
1970s a number of methods for doing this were produced. The following presentation
is indebted to Davies and Humberstone (1980), but other approaches might have been
x
used. The notation y A is interpreted as ‘A is true in world y from the perspective of
world x as actual’. So, letting @ be the actual world and w be a world in which only
XYZ is watery, we can represent what was said informally above as follows.
@
@
H2 O is watery and H2 O is water.
@
w XYZ is watery and H2 O is water.
w
@
H2 O is watery and XYZ is water.
w
w XYZ is watery and XYZ is water.

Now as Kripke noted, it is necessary but a posteriori that water is H2 O. Conversely,

it is a priori but contingent that water is watery. This is a priori because we knew
before we determined what water really is that it would be whatever plays the watery
role in this world, the actual world. In general A is necessary iff, given this is the
actual world, it is true in all worlds. And A is a priori iff, whatever the actual world
turns out to be like, it makes A true. So we get the following definitions.
w
A is a priori iff for all worlds w, w A.
@
A is necessary iff for all worlds w, w A.
Indicatives and Subjunctives 5

The connection between actuality and the a priori is important. It is a priori that we
are in the actual world. Something is a priori iff it is true whenever the two indices
are the same. If we regard possible worlds as sets of sentences, we can think of the sets
x
{A: x A} for each possible world x as the epistemically possible worlds. Note that
I don’t make the set of epistemically possible worlds relative to an evidence set, as
others commonly do. Rather they are just the sets of sentences consistent with what
x
we know a priori. More accurately, identify a world pair 〈x, y〉 with the set of {A: y
A}. Then 〈x, y〉 is an epistemically possible world pair iff x = y.
To finish this formal excursion, we note the definition of ‘Actually A’. Given
what has been said so far, this needs no explanation.
x x
y Actually A iff x A.

2.2 The Analysis of Indicatives

Now we have the resources for my theory of the truth conditions for indicatives. I
also give the parallel truth condition for subjunctives to show the similarities.
@ x x
@
A → B iff the nearest possible world x that x A is such that x B.
@ @ @
@
A € B iff the nearest possible world x that x A is such that x B.

These only cover the special case of what is true here from the perspective of this
world as actual. We can partially generalise the analysis of indicatives in one dimen-
sion as follows.
w x
w A → B iff the nearest possible world x to w such that x A is such that
x
x B.

I will make some comments below about how we might fully generalise the analysis,
but for now, I want to focus on these simpler cases. Note that straight away this makes
A → Actually A come out true, by the definition of ‘Actually’. If we allow ourselves
quantification over propositions, we can give an analysis of ‘things are different from
the way they actually are’, as follows:
x x
( y Things are different from the way they actually are) iff (∃ p: y p and
x
not x p)

Since nothing both is and is not the case in x from the perspective of x as actual, this
can never be true when y is x. This explains why it can never serve as the consequent
of an indicative conditional.
Indicatives and Subjunctives 6

2.3 Motivations
The theory outlined here is reasonably unified, and accounts for the rigidity phe-
nomena, but without any further justification, the resort to two-dimensional modal
logic is ad hoc. This subsection responds to that problem with some independent
motivations for the theory. In particular I argue that this theory best captures the
well-known epistemic feel of the indicative conditional.
Ever since Ramsey (1929) most theorists have held that there is an epistemic ele-
ment to indicatives. Here is Ramsey’s sketch of an analysis of indicatives.

If two people are arguing ‘If p will q?’ and are both in doubt as to p,
they are adding p hypothetically to their stock of knowledge and argu-
ing on that basis about q; so that in a sense ‘If p, q’ and ‘If p, ¬q’ are
contradictories (Ramsey, 1929, 247n).

Nothing of the sort could be true about subjunctives. What is in our ‘stock of knowl-
edge’, or the contextually relevant knowledge, makes at most an indirect contribution
to the truth- value of a subjunctive. It makes an indirect contribution because the
common knowledge might affect the context, which in turn determines the similar-
ity measure. But given a context, a subjunctive makes a broadly metaphysical claim,
an indicative a broadly epistemic claim. Hence, the relationship between the indica-
tive and subjunctive should parallel the relationship between the necessary and the a
priori. As should be clear, this is exactly what happens on this theory.
The close similarity between the indicative/subjunctive distinction and the a pri-
ori/necessary distinction can be demonstrated in other ways. For example, corre-
sponding to the contingent a priori (13) the indicative (14) is true, but the subjunctive
(15) is false. And corresponding to the necessary a posteriori (16) the subjunctive (17)
is true but the indicative (18) is false. (I am assuming that it is part of the definitions
of the water role and the fire role that nothing can play both roles.)

(13) Water is what plays the water role.

(14) If XYZ plays the water role, XYZ is water.
(15) If XYZ played the water role, it would be water.
(16) Water is H2 O.
(17) If all H2 O played the fire role, all water would be fire.
(18) If all H2 O plays the fire role, all water is fire.

This suggests the analysis sketched here is not ad hoc at all, but follows naturally from
considerations about the necessary and a priori. These sketchy considerations might
not provide much positive support for my theory. The main evidence for the the-
ory, however, is the way it manages the hard cases, particularly cases involving rigid
designation. What these considerations show is that the correct theory of indicatives
may invoke the resources of two-dimensional modal logic without automatically re-
nouncing any claim to systematicity.
Indicatives and Subjunctives 7

3 The Details
In this section, I want to look at four questions. First, what can we say about the
similarity measure at the core of this account? Secondly, how should we generalise
the theory to cover cases where the definite description in the analysis appears to
denote nothing? Thirdly, how should we generalise the theory to cover cases where
the two indices differ? Finally, how should we draw the line between indicatives
and subjunctives? If what I said in the previous section is correct, there should be
something to say about each of these questions, and what is said should be motivated.
While it is not important that what I say here is precisely true, I do hope that it is.
3.1 Nearness
Ideally, we could use exactly the same similarity metric for both indicatives and sub-
junctives. The existence of pairs like (11) and (12) suggests this is impossible. So
we must come up with a pair of measures on the worlds satisfying three constraints.
First, the measure for subjunctives must deliver plausible verdicts for most subjunc-
tive conditionals. Secondly, the measure for indicatives must deliver plausible verdicts
for most indicative conditionals. Thirdly, the measures must be similar enough that
we can explain the close relationship between indicatives and subjunctives set out in
section one. The theory of section two requires that these objectives be jointly sat-
isfiable. I will attempt to demonstrate that they are by outlining a pair of measures
satisfying all three.
Lewis (1979a) provides the measure for subjunctives. He suggests the following
four rules for locating the nearest possible world in which A is true.

1. It is of the first importance to avoid big, widespread, diverse violations of law.

2. It is of the second importance to maximise the spatio-temporal region through-
out which perfect match of particular fact prevails.
3. It is of the third importance to avoid even small, localized, simple violations of
law.
4. It is of little or no importance to secure approximate similarity of particular
fact, even in matters that concern us greatly. (Lewis, 1979a, 47-8)

The right measure for indicatives is somewhat simpler. Notice that whenever we
know that A ⊃ B and don’t know whether A, A → B seems true. More generally, if I
know some sentence S such that A and S together entail B, and I would continue to
know S even were I to come to doubt B, then A → B will seem true to me. No matter
how good a card cheat I know Sly Pete to be, if I know that he has the worse hand,
and that whenever someone with the worse hand calls they lose, it will seem true to
me that If Sly Pete calls, he will lose. Further, if someone else knows these background
facts and tells me that If Sly Pete calls, he will lose, she speaks truthfully.
This data suggests that whenever there is a true S such that A and S entail B,
A → B is true. But this would mean A → B is true whenever A ⊃ B is true, which
seems incredible. On this theory it is true that If there is a nuclear war tomorrow,
life will go on as normal. There are some very subtle attempts to make this palatable.
The ‘Supplemented Equivalence Theory’ in Jackson (1987) may even be successful.
Indicatives and Subjunctives 8

But two problems remain for all theories saying A → B has the truth value of A ⊃ B.
First, they make some apparently true negated conditionals turn out false, such as It
is not true that if there is a nuclear war tomorrow, life will go on as normal. It is hard
to see how an appeal to Gricean pragmatics will avoid this problem. Secondly, such
theories fail the third task we set ourselves at the start of the section: explaining the
close connections between indicatives and subjunctives.
So we might be tempted to try a different path. Let’s take the data at face value
and say that A → B is true in a context if there is some S such that some person in
that context knows S, and A and S together entail B. We can formalise this claim as
follows. Let d (x, y) be the ‘distance’ from x to y. This function will satisfy few of
the formal properties of a distance relationship, so remember this is just an analogy.
Let K be the set of all propositions S known by someone in the context, W the set
of all possible worlds, and i the impossible world, where everything is true. Then d :
W × W ∪ {i} → ℜ is as follows:

If y = x then d (x, y) = 0
y
If y ∈ W , y 6= x and ∀S: S ∈ K ⊃ y S, then d (x, y) = 1
If y = i then d (x, y) = 2
Otherwise, d (x, y) = 3

Less formally, the nearest world to a world is itself. The next closest worlds are
any compatible with everything known in the context, then the impossible world,
then the possible worlds incompatible with something known in the context. It may
seem odd to have the impossible world closer than some possible worlds, but there
are two reasons for doing this. First, in the impossible world everything known to
any conversational participant is true. Secondly, putting the impossible world at this
position accounts for some examples. This is a variant on a well known case; see for
example Gibbard (1981) and Barker (1997).
Jack and Jill are trying to find out how their local representative Kim, a Democrat
from Texas, voted on a resolution at a particular committee meeting. So far, they
have not even found out whether Kim was at the meeting. Jack finds out that all
Democrats at the meeting voted against the resolution; Jill finds out that all Texans
at the meeting voted for it. When they return to compare notes, Jack can truly say If
Kim was at the meeting, she voted against the resolution, and Jill can truly say If Kim
was at the meeting, she voted for the resolution. If i is further from the actual world
than some possible world where Kim attended the meeting, these statements cannot
both be true.
It may be thought the distance function needs to be more fine-grained to account
for the following phenomena2 . It seems possible that in each of the following pairs,
the first sentence is true and the second false.

(19) (a) If Anne goes to the party, so will Billy.

2 Lewis (1973) makes this objection to a similar proposal for subjunctives; the objection has just as much

force here as it does in the original case.

Indicatives and Subjunctives 9

(b) If Anne goes to the party, Billy will not go.

(20) (a) If Anne and Carly go to the party, Billy will not go.
(b) If Anne and Carly go to the party, so will Billy.
(21) (a) If Anne, Carly and Donna go to the party, so will Billy.
(b) If Anne, Carly and Donna go to the party, Billy will not.

Assume, as seems plausible, it is necessary and sufficient for A → B to be true that

the nearest A ∧ B world is closer than the nearest A ∧ ¬B world. (This does not im-
mediately follow from the analysis in section 2, but is obviously compatible with it.)
Given this, there is no context in which the first conditional in each pair is true, and
the second false. McCawley (1996) points out a way to accommodate these intuitions.
Every time a conditional is uttered, or considered in a private context, the context
shifts so as to accommodate the possibility that its antecedent is true. So at first we
don’t consider worlds where Carly or Donna turn up, and agree that (19a) is true and
(19b) false because in those worlds Billy loyally follows Anne to the party. When
(20a) or (20b) is uttered, or considered, we have to allow some worlds where Carly
goes to the party into the context set. In some of these worlds Anne goes to the party
and Billy doesn’t, the worlds where Carly goes to party. A similar story explains how
(21a) can be true despite (20b) being false.3
This move does seem to save the theory from potentially troubling data, but with-
out further support it may seems rather desperate. There are two independent moti-
vations for it. First, it explains the inappropriateness of (6).

(6) *Grannie won, but if she lost she was furious.

If assertion narrows the contextually relevant worlds to those where the assertion
is true, as Stalnaker (1978) suggests, and uttering a conditional requires expanding
the context to include worlds where the antecedent is true, it follows that utterances
like (6) will be defective. The speech acts performed by uttering each clause give
the hearer opposite instructions regarding how to amend the context set. Secondly,
McCawley’s assumption explains why we generally have little use for indicative con-
ditionals whose antecedents we know are false. To interpret an indicative we first
have to expand the context set to include a world where the antecedent is true, but
if we know the antecedent is false we usually have little reason to want to do that. If
there is a dispute over the size of the context set, we may want to expand it so as to
avoid miscommunication, which explains why we will sometimes assert conditionals
with antecedents we know to be false when trying to convince someone else that the
antecedent really is false.
So we have a pair of measures that give plausible answers on a wide range of cases.
Such a pair should also validate the close connection between indicatives and sub-
junctives we saw earlier. The data set out in section one suggests that this connection
may be close to synonymy, as in (1), but in some cases, as in (11) and (12), the con-
nection is much looser. The differing behaviour of rigid designators in indicatives
3 There is an obvious similarity between this argument and some of the uses of contextual dependence

in Lewis’s theory of knowledge (Lewis, 1996). Indeed, McCawley credits Lewis (1979b) as an inspiration
for his ideas.
Indicatives and Subjunctives 10

and subjunctives reveals a further difference, but the two-dimensional nature of the
analysis, not the particulars of the similarity metric, accounts for that. I propose to
explain the data by looking at which facts we hold fixed when trying to determine
the nearest possible world. The facts we hold fixed in evaluating indicatives and sub-
junctives, according to the two metrics outlined above, are the same in just the cases
we feel that the indicatives and subjunctives say the same thing.
When evaluating an indicative we hold fixed all the facts known by any member
of the conversation. When evaluating a subjunctive we hold fixed (a) all facts about
the world up to some salient time t and (b) the holding of the laws of nature at all
times after t. The time t is the latest time such that some worlds fitting this description
make A true and contain no large miracles. The two sets of facts held fixed match
when we know all the salient facts about times before t, and know no particular facts
about what happens after t.
In the opinion poll case, when evaluating the original indicative our knowledge at
the earlier time was held fixed. We knew that the polls predicted a Reagan landslide,
that when one makes spectacularly false predictions one is discredited, and so on.
When we turn to evaluating the subjunctive, we hold fixed the facts about the world
before the election (presumably the relevant time t) and some laws. Therefore, we
hold fixed the polls predictions, and the law that when one makes spectacularly false
predictions one is discredited. So the same facts are held fixed. And in general, this
will happen whenever all we know is all the specific facts up to the relevant time, and
some laws that allow us to extrapolate from those facts.
In the case where indicatives and subjunctives come apart, as in (11) and (12), the
relevant knowledge differs from the first case. By hypothesis, we do not know who
pulled the trigger, but we do know that a trigger was pulled. Our knowledge of the
relevant facts does not consist in knowledge of all the details up to a salient time, and
knowledge that the world will continue in a law-governed way after this. Therefore,
we would predict that the indicatives and subjunctives would come apart, because
what is held fixed when evaluating the two conditionals differs. We find exactly that.
So the pair of measures can explain the close connection between indicatives and
subjunctives when it exists, and explain why the two come apart when they do come
apart.
3.2 No Nearest Possible World
Generally, there are three kinds of problems under this heading. First, there may be
no A-worlds, and so no nearest A-world. Secondly, there may be an infinite sequence
of ever-nearer A-worlds without a nearest A-world. Thirdly, there may be several
worlds in a tie for nearest A-world. If the measure suggested in the previous section is
correct, the first two problems do not arise here. The third problem, however, arises
almost all the time, so we need to say something about it.
The approach I favour is set out in Stalnaker (1981). The comparative similarity
measure is a partial order on the possible worlds. Stalnaker recommends we assess
conditionals using supervaluations, taking the precisifications to be the complete ex-
tensions of this partial order. In particular, if several possible worlds tie for being the
Indicatives and Subjunctives 11

closest A-worlds4 , then A → B will be true if they are all B-worlds, false if they are all
¬B-worlds, and not truth-valued otherwise. For consistent A, this makes ¬(A → B)
equivalent to A → ¬B. Since we generally deny A → B just when we would be pre-
pared to assert A → ¬B, this seems like a good outcome.5 Further, this account makes
A → B generally come out gappy when A is false. Many theorists hold that indicative
conditionals, especially those with false antecedents, lack truth values.6 This can’t be
right in general, since it is a platitude that A → A is true for every A, but the posi-
tion has some attraction. Happily, our theory respects the motivations behind such
positions without violating the platitude.
In any case, these details are not important to the overall analysis. If someone
favours a resolution of ties along the lines Lewis suggested this could easily be ap-
pended onto the basic theory.
3.3 The General Theory
So far, I have just defined what it is for A → B to be true in this world from the
perspective of this world as actual. To have a fully general theory I need to say when
A → B is true in an arbitrary world from the perspective of another (possibly differ-
ent) world as actual. And that general theory must yield the theory above as a special
case when applied to our world. As with the special theory above, the general theory
will mostly be derived from Twin Earth considerations.
x z z
In general, y A → B iff the nearest world pair 〈z, v〉 such that v A is such that v
B. Nearness is again defined epistemically, but what we know about x and y matters.
z
In particular if v C for all sentences C such that someone in the context knows that
x u
y C , but not w C for some such C , then 〈z, v〉 is closer to 〈x, y〉 than is 〈u, w〉. As
should be clear from this, nearness is context-dependent, and the context it depends
on is the actual speaker’s context. For conditionals as for quantified sentences, the
same words will express different propositions in different contexts.
Let’s draw out some consequences of this definition. First, for any x we know
x x
that x C for all a priori propositions C . In particular, we know that x D ≡ (Actually
D) for any proposition D, where ‘≡’ represents the material biconditional. So the
nearest world pair 〈z, v〉 to 〈x, x〉 must be one in which z = v, even if that means z is
the impossible world i. Hence the general theory of indicatives reduces to the special
theory set out above when applied to epistemically possible worlds: when assessing
the truth value of an indicative in an epistemically possible world pair we need only
look at other epistemically possible world pairs.
Secondly, when evaluating conditionals with respect to epistemically impossible
world pairs 〈x, y〉, we need to use other epistemically impossible world pairs. For
example, imagine some explorers are wandering around Twin Australia, a dry conti-
nent to the south of Twin Earth. As explorers of such lands are wont to do, they are
4 Of x
course in this context x is an A- world iff x A.
5 Edgington (1996) furnishes some nice examples against the view that A € B should be false when
there are several equally close A-worlds in a tie for closest and some are B-worlds but some are ¬B-worlds.
6 See Edgington (1995) for an endorsement of this position and discussion of others who have held it.
Indicatives and Subjunctives 12

dying of thirst, so they are seeking some watery stuff to save themselves. Without
knowing whether they succeed, we know (22) is false.
(22) If the explorers find some watery stuff, they will find some water.
This theory can explain the falsity of (22). We know, from the way Twin Earth is
stipulated, that all the watery stuff of the explorers’ acquaintance is not water. So we
know any watery stuff they find will not be water. And we know that water is scarce
on Twin Earth, even scarcer than watery stuff in Twin Australia, so it is unlikely they
will find some watery stuff and simultaneously stumble across some water.
This theory also explains occurrences of indicatives embedded in subjunctives.
These are very odd, as should be expected if indicatives are about epistemic connec-
tions and subjunctives about metaphysical connections, but we can just make sense
of them some of the time. For example, it seems possible to make sense of (23) and
that it is true.
(23) If the bullet that actually killed JFK had instead killed Jackie Kennedy, then it
would be true that if Oswald didn’t kill Jackie Kennedy, someone else did.
@
On our theory, to evaluate this we first find the nearest world pair 〈@, w〉 such that w
The bullet that actually killed JFK instead killed Jackie Kennedy, and then evaluate
the indicative relative to it. Now one thing we know about this world pair is that
in it, someone killed Jackie Kennedy. So this must hold in all nearby world pairs.
Hence in any such world pair that Oswald did not kill Jackie Kennedy, someone else
did, so (23) turns out true.
It might be thought that such embeddings do not make particularly good sense. I
have some sympathy for such a view. If one adopts the ‘special theory’ developed in
the previous section, and rejects the general theory developed in this subsection, one
may have an explanation for the impossibility of such embeddings. However, even if
we cannot make sense of such embeddings, we still need to account for the truth con-
ditions of indicatives relative to epistemically impossible world pairs to make sense
of claims such as Necessarily (A → A).7
3.4 Classifying Conditionals
In recent years, there has been extensive debate over where the line between indica-
tives and subjunctives falls. This debate focuses on whether ‘future indicatives’ like
(24) are properly classified with indicatives or subjunctives.
(24) If Booth doesn’t shoot Lincoln, someone else will.
Jackson (1990) and Bennett (1995) argue that this should go with ordinary indica-
tives. Dudman (1994) and Bennett (1988) argue that it should go with ordinary sub-
junctives, though this is not how Dudman would put it. This theory of indicatives
appears to favour Jackson and (the later) Bennett, because of the apparent triviality
of conditionals like (25).
(25) If it will rain then it will actually rain.
7I am indebted to Lloyd Humberstone for pointing this out to me.
Indicatives and Subjunctives 13

4 Conclusion
Despite its lack of attention in the literature, data about the role of rigid designators
in indicatives deserve close attention. Any plausible theory of indicatives must be
able to deal with it, and it isn’t clear how existing possible worlds theories could do
so. The easiest way to build a semantics for indicatives is to say that “If A then C ”
is true just in case the nearest world in which A is true is a world where C is true.
Even before the hard questions about the meaning of ‘nearest’ here start to be asked,
we know a theory of this form is wrong because it makes mistaken predictions about
the role of rigid designators. A conditional like “If the stuff in the rivers, lakes and
oceans really is XYZ, then water is XYZ” is true, even though the consequent is true
in no possible worlds. The simplest way to solve this difficulty is to revisit the idea
of ‘true in a world’. Rather than looking for a nearby world in which A is true, and
asking whether C is true in it, we look for a nearby world w such that A is true under
the supposition that w is actual, and ask whether C is true under the supposition that
w is actual. In the terminology of Jackson (1998), we look at worlds considered as
actual, rather than worlds considered as counterfactual. This simple change makes
an important difference to the way rigid designators behave. There is no world in
which water is XYZ. However, under the supposition that the stuff in the rivers,
lakes and oceans really is XYZ, and the H2 O theory is just a giant mistake, that is,
under the supposition that we are in the world known as Twin Earth, water is XYZ.
In short, “water is XYZ” is true in Twin Earth considered as actual, even though it
is false in Twin Earth considered as counterfactual. So the data about behaviour of
rigid designators in indicatives, data like the truth of “If the stuff in the rivers, lakes
and oceans really is XYZ, then water is XYZ”, does not refute the hypothesis that “If
A then C ” is true iff the nearest world such that A is true in that world considered as
actual is a world where C is true in that world considered as actual.
In section two we looked at how the formal structure of a theory built around
that hypothesis might look. In section three we looked at how some of the details
may be filled in. The most pressing task is to provide a similarity metric so we can
have some idea about which worlds will count as being nearby. The theory I defended
has three important features. First, it is epistemic. Which worlds are nearby depends
on what is known by conversational participants. Secondly, it is contextualist in two
respects. The first respect is that it is the knowledge of the audience that matters, not
just the knowledge of the speaker and the intended audience. The second respect is
that it allows that what is known by the audience may be affected by the utterance
of the conditional. In particular, if the utterance of “If A, B” causes the audience to
consider A to be possible, and hence cease to know that ¬A, then A is not part of
what is known for purposes of determining which worlds are nearby. (I assume here
a broadly contextualist account of knowledge, as in Lewis (1996), but this is inessen-
tial. If you do not like Lewis’s theory, replace all references to knowledge here, and
in section 3.1, with references to epistemic certainty. I presume that what is epistem-
ically certain really is contextually variable in the way Lewis suggests.) Thirdly, it is
coarse- grained: whether a world is nearby depends only on whether it is consistent
with what is known, not ‘how much’ it agrees with what is known. The resultant
Indicatives and Subjunctives 14

theory seems to capture all the data, to explain the generally close connection be-
tween indicatives and subjunctives, and to explain the few differences which do arise
between indicatives and subjunctives.
The other detail to be filled in concerns embeddings of indicatives inside subjunc-
tives. The formalism here requires that we use the full resources of two- dimensional
modal logic, but the basic idea is very simple. Consider a sentence of the form “If it
were the case that A, it would be the case that if B, C .” Roughly, this will be true
iff the metaphysically nearest world in which A is true, call it wA, is a world where
B → C is true. And that will be true iff the epistemically nearest world to wA is
which B is true is a world where C is true. Less roughly, we have to quantify not
over worlds, but over pairs of worlds, where the first element of the pair determines
the reference for rigid designators, and the second element determines the truth of
sentences given those references. But this only adds to the formal complexity; the
underlying idea is still the same. The important philosophical point to note is that
when we are trying to find the epistemically nearest world to wA (or, more strictly,
the nearest world pair to 〈@, wA〉) the facts that have to be held fixed are the facts that
we know about wA, not what our counterparts in wA, or indeed what any inhabitant
of wA knows about their world. These embeddings may be rare in everyday speech,
but since they are our best guide to the truth values of indicatives in other possible
worlds, they are theoretically very important.
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