This is a draft. Please do not quote without permission from the author. The Logic of the Indicative Conditional Part 2: A semantic analysis John Cantwell (cantwell@kth.se) Abstract This is the second part of two in a study on the logic and semantics of the indicative conditional. The first part provided an analysis of the indicative conditional in terms of the usage conditions given by the Ramsey Test. This second part provides a semantics for the indicative conditional building on the idea that the basic semantic notion is that of truth relative to an assump- tion (or relative to a modal background). The semantic role of the antecedent of a conditional is to constrain the modal background relative to which the consequent is to be evaluated. The logic for this semantics of the conditional is completely characterised. Furthermore, it is shown that the resulting se- mantics characterises the semantic content of the usage conditions as given by the Ramsey Test, thus establishing a firm connection between usage con- ditions and truth conditions for the indicative conditional. It is argued that the truth value of a conditional is in an important way neither context depen- dent or assessment relative, but objective. The basic idea behind the seman- tics is compared and contrasted with the semantics of Stalnaker, Lewis and Kratzer; it is also applied to conditionals containing ought modalities giving a treatment of the miner’s paradox. 1 Introduction This is the second part of a study aimed at characterising the semantic determi- nants that give rise to the logic of the indicative conditional. The first part (‘Part 1: A global expressivist analysis’) provided a broadly expressivist analysis of the indicative conditional along the lines of the Ramsey Test, yielding a logic: ‘ICL’. This second part provides a semantic characterisation of the central ingredients of the expressivist analysis: the contents of the cognitive structures invoked by the expressivist analysis and the logic ICL that it generates. It also attempts to shed some light on what it is that makes conditional sentences true or false, bridging the gap between the issues addressed in standard expressivist analyses, and the issues 1