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Subjunctive biscuit and stand-off conditionals

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Abstract

Conventional wisdom has it that many intriguing features of indicative conditionals aren’t shared by subjunctive conditionals. Subjunctive morphology is common in discussions of wishes and wants, however, and conditionals are commonly used in such discussions as well. As a result such discussions are a good place to look for subjunctive conditionals that exhibit features usually associated with indicatives alone. Here I offer subjunctive versions of J. L. Austin’s ‘biscuit’ conditionals—e.g., “There are biscuits on the sideboard if you want them”—and subjunctive versions of Allan Gibbard’s ‘stand-off’ or ‘Sly Pete’ conditionals, in which speakers with no relevant false beliefs can in the same context felicitously assert conditionals with the same antecedents and contradictory consequents. My cases undercut views according to which the indicative/subjunctive divide marks a great difference in the meaning of conditionals. They also make trouble for treatments of indicative conditionals that cannot readily be generalized to subjunctives.

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Notes

  1. For extensive discussion, see Iatridou (2000).

  2. See also Iatridou (1991, pp. 52–58), Geis and Lycan (1993), Dancygier and Sweetser (1997, p. 121; 2005, Chap. 5), Derose and Grandy (1999), Lycan (2001, pp. 206–210), Siegel (2006), Franke (2007), Scheffler (2008a), and Predelli (2009).

  3. See also Iatridou (1994) and Bhatt and Pancheva (2006).

  4. Judgments about Iatridou’s original examples (and about my examples) are mixed; some informants find (9), (11), (13), and (15) marginal at best. Many of these informants nevertheless see contrasts between the elements of the relevant pairs. Whether or not such contrasts on their own are sufficient for all of Iatridou’s purposes, they may be helpful diagnostics for biscuit conditionals. Informants who find no contrast between these pairs, of course, simply need to fall back on other diagnostics. (Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for Philosophical Studies for discussion.)

  5. English is often classed as a ‘residual’ Verb Second language on the basis of contrasts like

    1. (i)

      Under no circumstances [is [John [allowed to continue in his work]]].

    2. (ii)

      *Under no circumstances [John [is [allowed to continue in his work]]].

    See especially Rizzi (1991, 1996) and Culicover (1992).

  6. Thanks to Inge Genee, Janneke Huitink, and Robert van Rooij for judgments and helpful discussion.

  7. Thanks to Kai von Fintel and Franz Huber for translations, judgments, and helpful discussion.

  8. There are some passing discussions of Philip Johnson-Laird’s “If you had needed some money, there was some in the bank” (1986, p. 51) and similar examples in the literature. But I think Johnson-Laird is right to emphasize that in examples like these the antecedents target “alternative histories” while the consequents target “actual states” (p. 70). Declerck and Reed concur, saying that in the conditional “If you had been hungry, there was plenty of food in the fridge,” “an imaginary P-clause combines with a factual Q-clause” (p. 324). These conditionals are thus at best “hybrids between subjunctive and indicative” (Franke 2009, p. 270). For other brief discussions of this kind of biscuit conditional, see McCawley (1996), von Fintel (1999), and Scheffler (2008b).

  9. For discussion see Skyrms (1980a, b, 1994) and Edgington (1991, 1995, 1997a, 2008). It is also worth noting that Edgington (1995, pp. 287–288) and Michael Woods (1997, pp. 76–77) appeal to conditional questions that are reminiscent of biscuit conditionals to support conditional speech act analyses, and there are subjunctive conditional questions: see Isaacs and Rawlins (2008).

  10. This framework for setting up a Gibbardian stand-off—namely, providing a single source of evidence that underwrites very different conditional probabilities when that source of evidence is incompletely but accurately apprehended from different vantage points—is originally due to Edgington (1997b, p. 107).

  11. For discussion of other putative reasons to think there are ‘epistemic’ subjunctive conditionals, see Kratzer (1981, 1989), Hansson (1989), Morreau (1992), Lindström and Rabinowicz (1995), Rott (1999), Veltman (2005) (but compare his 1985, pp. 217–218), and Schulz (2007). In his 2005 Veltman says he “doubts” that counterfactuals have epistemic readings, but the basis for his doubt is that “only people who have gone through the same epistemic process” as the speaker would be able to “appreciate” such readings (p. 174). Whatever its merits with respect to standard examples, this consideration isn’t relevant to my examples of subjunctive stand-offs.

  12. See, e.g., Gibbard (1981), Stalnaker (1984), Bennett (1988, 2003), Edgington (1991, 1995, 1997b), and Woods (1997).

  13. See her (1991, 1995, 1997b) see also Morton (1997). My cases do without Edgington’s assumption that “ ‘If Jones had … he would have …’ expresses at a later time what ‘If Jones does …, he will …’ expressed at an earlier time” (1997b, p. 108).

  14. But see Weatherson’s subsequent (2009, p. 347) for some reservations.

  15. See also Karttunen and Peters (1979), Palmer (1986), Iatridou (2000), and Ippolito (2003, 2006).

  16. This particular example is due to Anderson (1951, p. 37), but see also Firth (1943, Chap. 7), and Chisholm (1946, p. 291).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Benj Hellie and Jason Stanley for the conversation that led to this paper. For helpful discussion, thanks to Kai von Fintel, Allan Gibbard, Franz Huber, Janneke Huitink, Sarah Moss, and an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies.

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    Eric Swanson

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Swanson, E. Subjunctive biscuit and stand-off conditionals. Philos Stud 163, 637–648 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9836-9

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