ABSTRACT

Clearly, the two conditionals differ in meaning. The conditional in (1) signals that it is an open possibility that Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy and will be judged true by anyone who knows that Kennedy was in fact assassinated. The conditional in (2), in contrast, signals that it is taken for granted that Oswald did in fact kill Kennedy and makes the somewhat dubious claim that Kennedy’s assassination was inevitable, perhaps based on a vast conspiracy. The same difference in meaning can be illustrated with a similar pair (due to Bennett or Stalnaker?), where it is even harder to hear the second conditional as making a plausible claim:

(3) If Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet, someone else did. (4) If Shakespeare hadn’t written Hamlet, someone else would have.