Indicative conditionals are omnipresent in contexts of deliberation, yet decision theorists tend to treat them with reservation, since they can easily lead a deliberating agent astray. Nevertheless, many indicatives can be very helpful in contexts of deliberation, so denying them all a role in such contexts seems to be an overkill. I will argue that distinguishing between types of inferences that can be expressed by indicative conditionals is the key to telling “deliberationally useless” and “deliberationally useful” conditionals apart. Finally, I will discuss the status of these inferences at the semantics-pragmatics interface.
© 2017 K. Schulz