Indicative conditional

Not to be confused with Counterfactual conditional.
This article is about indicative conditionals in natural language. For the truth-functional connective, see Material conditional.

An indicative conditional is a natural-language conditional sentence (an "if" sentence) used to talk about what may actually be the case, as in: "If Leona is at home, she isn't in Paris." Indicatives are commonly contrasted with counterfactual conditionals, which typically bear special grammatical marking (e.g., "would have") and are used to discuss ways things might have been but are not.

Indicative conditionals are central in philosophy of language, philosophical logic (especially conditional logic), and linguistics. Debates concern (i) what semantic value, if any, such conditionals have; (ii) how their contribution composes with surrounding material; and (iii) how competing accounts explain observed patterns of assertion, reasoning, and embedding. Prominent proposals include truth-functional analyses, pragmatics-augmented accounts, probabilistic ("suppositional") approaches, possible-worlds semantics, and restrictor treatments of if.

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