Conditionals and indexical relativism

This paper is about a class of conditionals that Anthony Gillies (ms) has dubbed ‘open indicatives’, that is, indicative conditionals “whose antecedents are consistent with our picture of the world” (1). I believe that what I say here can eventually be extended to all indicative conditionals, but indicatives that aren’t open raise special problems, so I’ll set them aside for today. In [auth 2001] I argued for an epistemic treatment of open indicatives, and implemented this in a contextualist semantics. In this paper I want to give another argument for the epistemic approach, but retract the contextualism. Instead I’ll put forward a relativist semantics for open indicatives. The kind of relativism I’ll defend is what I’ll dub ‘indexical relativism’. I’ve changed my mind sinceWeatherson (2001) largely because of developments since I wrote that paper. There have been six primary influences on this paper, listed here in order that they become relevant to the paper.