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When referring to hypothetical future circumstance, there may be little difference in meaning between the first and second conditional (factual vs. counterfactual, realis vs. irrealis). The following two sentences have similar meaning, although the second (with the second conditional) implies less likelihood that the condition will be fulfilled:
A conditional sentence is a sentence in a natural language that expresses that one thing is contingent on another, e.g., "If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled." They are so called because the impact of the sentence’s main clause is conditional on a subordinate clause.
A "first conditional" sentence expresses a future circumstance conditional on some other future circumstance. It uses the present tense (with future reference) in the condition clause, and the future with will (or some other expression of future) in the main clause: If he comes late, I will be angry. A "second conditional" sentence expresses a ...
Examples are the English and French conditionals (an analytic construction in English, [a] but inflected verb forms in French), which are morphologically futures-in-the-past, [1] and of which each has thus been referred to as a "so-called conditional" [1] [2] (French: soi-disant conditionnel [3] [4] [5]) in modern and contemporary linguistics ...
They were first discussed as a problem for the material conditional analysis of conditionals, which treats them all as trivially true. Starting in the 1960s, philosophers and linguists developed the now-classic possible world approach, in which a counterfactual's truth hinges on its consequent holding at certain possible worlds where its ...
(The second vowel of ἐάν (eán) is long, as appears from examples in Sophocles and Aristophanes.) [15] Conditional sentences of this kind are referred to by Smyth as the "more vivid" future conditions, and are very common. [16] In the following examples, the protasis has the present subjunctive, and the apodosis has the future indicative:
First-order logic—also called predicate logic, predicate calculus, quantificational logic—is a collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quantified variables over non-logical objects, and
For instance, counterfactual conditionals would all be vacuously true on such an account, when in fact some are false. [8] In the mid-20th century, a number of researchers including H. P. Grice and Frank Jackson proposed that pragmatic principles could explain the discrepancies between natural language conditionals and the material conditional.