Abstract

Subjunctives have always posed a severe threat to truth-conditional semantics and the correspondence theory of truth. If we are ever forced to fall into some sort of coherence theory of truth, then the problem of subjunctives is very likely to be the first thing which makes this plain. It is instructive to work through the details of Pollock's very thorough working-out of a kind of coherence theory for subjunctives.I find Pollock's book a kind of cautionary tale for coherence theorists. The fierce technical complexities and inelegancies of Pollock's account must surely be weighed against the ontological extravagance of Lewis's much more elegant modal realism