In contemporary philosophy, a hypothetical is a statement that considers what would, could, or will be the case under a specified condition. The term covers indicative conditionals as well as subjunctive conditionals, including counterfactuals.

An ordinary hypothetical is a singular conditional statement ("if p, then q") concerning a particular (i.e. singular, dated or datable) case.

Ordinary hypotheticals resemble the material conditionals studied in formal logic because they have the same surface form ("if p, then q").

The Law of Excluded Middle states that every proposition is either true or false. Any genuine proposition satisfies the Law of Excluded Middle on its own terms: taken as a whole, it must be either true or false. A material implication is a proposition that is either true or false according to the truth values of its antecedent and consequent.

Frank Ramsey argues that the role of ordinary hypotheticals in reasoning is different than the material implication.

An ordinary hypothetical functions as a conditional judgment whose evaluation depends on supposing the antecedent rather than assigning a truth value to the conditional itself.

Take the ordinary hypothetical

‘If I were you, I would take the bet’

The antecedent ‘If I were you …’ is false, yet under the material implication, the conditional ‘If I were you, I would take the bet’ is (vacuous) true. In practice, an agent does not assess whether ‘If I were you, I would take the bet’ is (vacuous). Instead, an agent assesses whether they agree or disagree with ‘If I were you, I would take the bet’. 

An ordinary hypothetical as a whole is never assigned a truth-value. Only its consequent is, and only conditionally, once the antecedent is supposed true.

Since the whole sentence ‘If I were you, I would take the bet’ is not simply true or false, it fails the test that marks a genuine proposition. Frank Ramsey concludes ordinary hypotheticals are not genuine propositions, but sentences that express cognitive attitudes.

An agent does not treat ‘If I were you, I would take the bet’ as a proposition that can be true or false, but as a conditional judgement that can be agreed or disagreed with.

To understand how an agent makes a judgment to agree or disagree with an ordinary hypothetical, it is useful to classify ordinary hypotheticals based on two dimensions: time and modal status:

• Time

Time refers to when the event named in the antecedent (the "if" clause) is supposed to occur, relative to the moment of speaking. There are three possible values.

1. Present means the event is happening now, or is understood as a current state of affairs.

2. Past means the event has already happened, or is claimed to have already happened, before the moment of speaking.

3. Future means the event has not yet happened and is placed after the moment of speaking.

Time does not say anything about whether the agent believes the event actually occurred or will occur. It only fixes where the event sits on the timeline.

•  Modal Status

Modal status refers to whether the agent treats the antecedent as open or as false. It does not say anything about when the event occurs; that is the role of Time.

Modal status has two possible values: Open or Unreal.

1. Open means the agent does not yet know, or does not yet treat as settled, whether the antecedent is true or false. The matter remains undecided from the agent's point of view.

2. Unreal means the agent treats the antecedent as false, or as going against what is actually the case.

An agent cannot make a judgement to agree or disagree with an ordinary hypothetical in isolation. To make that judgement, an agent needs to hold a ‘rule for judging’. Ramsey refers to these rules for judging as variable hypotheticals.

An agent asserting ‘If I were you, I would take the bet’ might hold the rule for judging/variable hypothetical: 

"If I am offered a bet with positive expected value, at stakes I can afford given my risk tolerance, I will take it."

This specific variable hypothetical forms singular beliefs that link ‘a bet with positive expected value, at affordable stakes given the agent’s risk tolerance’ to ‘accepting a bet’ with an affirmative character across future instances.

When the antecedent of the variable hypothetical is satisfied by a particular case, it produces a singular belief in which the linkage is made and asserted for that case.

Two agents who hold different variable hypotheticals may therefore agree or disagree differently with the same ordinary hypothetical, without either being mistaken about the singular case itself; the disagreement lies in which expectations-generating rule each brings to it.

The following table applies the distinction between Time and Modal Status, set out above, to six ordinary hypotheticals built around a single scenario: Jones's attendance at a meeting and his vote.

The categorical fact that everyone votes, voted, or will vote conservative does not by itself determine an agent's agreement or disagreement with any of these six ordinary hypotheticals.

What determines agreement or disagreement is the agent's background variable hypothetical, applied to Jones as a particular case; the categorical fact supplies context, not the rule itself.

The agent might hold the variable hypothetical:

‘If Jones attends these meetings, I shall expect Jones to vote conservative.’

Applying that variable hypothetical to each of the six cases yields a status for the antecedent and consequent in each, set out in the table below.

The status of the antecedent and consequent determines how an agent evaluates an ordinary hypothetical.

1.     If p and q both open for the agent (the typical indicative case), an agent evaluates an ordinary hypothetical as Conditional Bet.

The agent adds p hypothetically to their stock of knowledge and argues on that basis about q, fixing a degree of belief in q given p, in effect a conditional wager on q that is off unless p is true. Applying the variable hypothetical as rule for judging to the supposition p yields a degree of belief in q, conditional on p.

2.     If p is known false (the counterfactual case), an agent evaluates an ordinary hypothetical as Conditional Inference.

Since p is already known not to hold, there is nothing left to wager on; the question is no longer whether q will turn out to be true, but what follows if p is nonetheless supposed. The agent supposes p, conjoins it with the relevant facts of the case, and infers q based on the variable hypothetical the agent holds. Applying the variable hypothetical as a rule for judging, rather than as a source of odds, yields q as a conclusion drawn from the supposition, not a probability attached to an open outcome.

An agent would evaluate examples 1-3 and 6 as a conditional bet, and examples 4&5 as a conditional inference.

Contemporary philosophy typically distinguishes indicative from subjunctive conditionals by grammatical mood.

Ramsey's analysis, reconstructed above, suggests that this is not the distinction governing the evaluation by an agent of ordinary hypotheticals.

Instead, the decisive factor is the epistemic status of the antecedent. When the antecedent is treated as open, the agent evaluates the hypothetical by Conditional Bet; when it is treated as false and merely supposed, the agent evaluates it by Conditional Inference.

• Present, past, and future open hypotheticals fall under Conditional Bet. Future remote hypotheticals also fall under Conditional Bet, since a future antecedent cannot yet be known false and so remains open.
• Present and past counterfactual hypotheticals fall under Conditional Inference.