“If”-Clauses and Conditional Meaning

Careful readings of Lycan (2001) renewed my interest in philosophical semantics. Real Conditionals engaged with actual language. The wide variety of ways English expresses conditionality was acknowledged and addressed. But the paraphrases into first-order logic seemed the wrong way to proceed. Individual words make systematic contributions to truth-conditions. A theory of “only if” should start with “only” and “if” and show how their contributions combine. So, “non-conditional conditionals,” where “then” must be absent, was the place to start a theory of “if”-sentences.