Abstract

Woods argues that there is just one meaning of ‘if’ in all conditionals. Like Dudman, he thinks that the traditional division into “indicatives” and “subjunctives” is wrong; but unlike Dudman, he thinks that even a line drawn in the right place won’t distinguish two senses of ‘if’. Woods’s comprehensive account of conditionals has three main ingredients: the meaning of ‘if’, the meaning of ‘will’/‘would’, and the temporal significance of tense.