Modal Conditionals and Relative Modality

In Real Conditionals (2001), Bill Lycan develops an event-based account of indicative conditionals, which presents an attractive alternative to the theories advanced by David Lewis, Angelika Kratzer, and Irene Heim. In this chapter, we argue that while Lycan’s semantic theory is explanatorily on a par with the alternatives while employing fewer expressive resources, it ultimately succumbs to problems owing to its treatment of ‘if’-clauses as restricting the domain of a possible event quantifier. We proceed by developing a semantic theory of conditionals that treats ‘if’-clauses as plural definite descriptions denoting a plurality of events and overt quantified and modal expressions as partitives that select a subset of the events denoted by the ‘if’-clause. Our theory differs from previous plural definite accounts of conditionals, which take ‘if’-clauses to be referential plural definite descriptions that restrict an overt or covert possible world quantifier. The proposed theory, we argue, avoids the problems that plague both singular and plural restrictor accounts.