Indicative versus subjunctive in future conditionals

By Adam Morton

There are both Indicative and Subjunctive future-tense conditionals. And moreover sometimes the same words can be used to express both.

Jonathan Bennett (2003), in his wonderfully clear and persuasive book, A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals, continues a debate concerning conditionals about the future. For conditionals about the past there is a clear contrast between so-called indicative and subjunctive conditionals. For most people the contrast is typified by a familiar family of incompatible pairs of sentences such as

If Shakespeare did not write Hamlet someone else did.
If Shakespeare had not written Hamlet someone else would have.

The first of these is assertable, given normal beliefs about the world, and the second is not, so the `did/would have' contrast seems to mark a difference in meaning. I'll call these `Adams pairs', since the first examples were due to Ernest Adams.
I'll assume familiarity with the basic use of Adams pairs to make an indicative/subjunctive distinction. Most people on absorbing the distinction are inclined to classify many future tense conditionals, such as

If Bill won't write the play, someone else will.

with subjunctive `did/would have' past-tense conditionals. Bennett argues against this, urging us to classify `will/will' and `is/will' conditionals with indicative `did/did' ones. Bennett's claim is strong: not only are future tense conditionals usually of the indicative variety, but we cannot use these grammatical forms to express subjunctive conditionals. In this paper I shall contest this latter claim, focusing on paired examples in the familiar family. So the central task is to show that there are Adams pairs set in the future.

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Posted by Tony Marmo at 19:24 BST

Updated: Monday, 18 October 2004 19:28 BST

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