**This is the penultimate draft. For citations please see the published version.** Counterfactual Discourse in Context * Karen S. Lewis Barnard College, Columbia University Department of Philosophy Abstract The classic Lewis-Stalnaker semantics for counterfactuals captures that So- bel sequences are consistent sequences, for example: a. If Sophie had gone to the parade, she would have seen Pedro dance. b. But if Sophie had gone to the parade and been stuck behind someone tall, she would not have seen Pedro dance. But reverse a sequence like this one and it no longer sounds so good, which is surprising on the classic semantics. This observation motivated Kai von Fintel (2001) and Thony Gillies (2007) to propose dynamic semantic accounts of counterfactual conditionals. Subsequently, Sarah Moss (2012) defended the classic semantics against the charge that it need be abandoned in the face of these order effects, arguing that the infelicity of the reverse sequences is pragmatic. I argue that both accounts are ultimately untenable, but each account has strengths. Seeing what works and what doesn’t in each account points the way to the right positive view. With this in mind, I defend a contextualist account of counterfactuals that takes conversational relevance to play a central role. * I’m grateful for conversations on this topic with too many people over too long a period of time to remember them all; I am particularly grateful for extensive conversations with David Chalmers, Sarah Moss, and Paolo Santorio on earlier versions of this paper. Earlier drafts of this paper benefited enormously from the comments and questions of audience members at: the 2015 Central APA symposium on counterfactuals, the Society for Women in Philosophy (NYC, March 2015), the first annual Belgrade conference on conditionals (May 2015), the Mid-Atlantic Philosophy of Language Workshop (West Virginia, August 2015), the Philosophy of Language and Linguistics Conference (Dubrovnik, September 2015), the David Lewis Workshop (Hamburg, September 2015), and the Ranch Metaphysics Workshop (Arizona, January 2016). All mistakes are my own. 1