Do Indicative Conditionals Express Propositions?

In this paper I will focus on the question of what theoretical object we should use to represent the meaning of certain sentences. In particular, I will focus on the question of whether we should use propositions to represent the meaning of indicative conditionals. Before getting into this question I’ll try to locate it in the broader scheme of things. In recent years, the so-called semantic/pragmatics debate has focused on the gap between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. Generally, participants in that debate take for granted that we use sentences to express propositions, objects that at the minimum determine a set of truth-conditions. The semantics/pragmatics debate focuses on how sentences are used to express propositions. However, the question I will focus on is not how sentences come to express whatever they do express, but rather what, at the end of the day, they do express. There is plenty of controversy about whether sentences really do express propositions, even after pragmatic enrichment. There are some philosophical traditions that view talk of truth conditions and propositions as generally suspect.1 The considerations that push people to this view tend to be programmatic philosophical ones. I am not going to discuss this sort of blanket anti-propositionalism. However, even outside of these traditions there are some who think that, while sentences can in general express propositions, as it happens some sentences of our language do not do so. There are usually two different sorts of motivations for this view. On the one hand, you might think that the kind of facts a given part of language aims to express simply don’t exist. For instance, many philosophers worry about whether moral claims can really, properly speaking, be true or false. This worry then extends to a worry about ∗Forthcoming in Noûs. I am grateful to Chris Barker, Mikaël Cozic, Dorothy Edgington, Paul Égré, Angelika Krazter, Nathan Klinedinst, Philippe Schlenker, Brett Sherman, Benjamin Spector and Lee Walters as well as an anonymous referee for comments. I am also grateful to audiences the UCL, Institut Jean-Nicod, and the University of Glasgow for many comments and suggestions. 1Many understand the late Wittgenstein this way. More recent pragmatists such as Robert Brandom would fall into this category, too.