This past weekend, I was at the Conditionals Conference at UConn, which was lots of fun. I was one of two linguists on the program (Stefan Kaufmann was the other). Instead of talking about my current research paper on conditionals (the Harlem paper), I decided to give a more expository talk about how many linguists view conditionals, namely through the lens of the Lewis/Kratzer/Heim analysis that sees if-clauses as restrictors for modal operators. After introducing that view and Angelika’s conjecture that indicative conditionals, at least those of a particular sort, involve covert epistemic modality, I proceeded to defend that view against the rather mainstream view among philosophers that indicatives do not express propositions, do not have truth-conditions.

I got lots of good feedback and encouragement, which will be helpful when I write this stuff up for the book on conditionals that I am supposedly developing for Oxford’s new “Surveys in Semantics and Pragmatics” series.

For the time being, the slides and some selected references are online.