Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Counterfactuals, irrelevant semifactuals and the $1.000.000 bet. [REVIEW]Lars Bo Gundersen & Jesper Kallestrup - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    You've just read the first sentence of this paper. Would you have read it if some butterfly in Brazil had had some extra nectar for breakfast? You probably think so. But this trivial observation apparently has very dramatic consequences. For instance, it seems to imply that you would have read that very sentence even if someone had offered you $1.000.000 not to do so. This paper is about what thus looks like a paradox in that a counterintuitive conclusion can seemingly (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Modality, expected utility, and hypothesis testing.WooJin Chung & Salvador Mascarenhas - 2023 - Synthese 202 (1):1-40.
    We introduce an expected-value theory of linguistic modality that makes reference to expected utility and a likelihood-based confirmation measure for deontics and epistemics, respectively. The account is a probabilistic semantics for deontics and epistemics, yet it proposes that deontics and epistemics share a common core modal semantics, as in traditional possible-worlds analysis of modality. We argue that this account is not only theoretically advantageous, but also has far-reaching empirical consequences. In particular, we predict modal versions of reasoning fallacies from the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • A Probabilistic Truth-Conditional Semantics for Indicative Conditionals.Michał Sikorski - 2022 - Semiotic Studies 35 (2):69-87.
    In my article, I present a new version of a probabilistic truth prescribing semantics for natural language indicative conditionals. The proposed truth conditions can be paraphrased as follows: an indicative conditional is true if the corresponding conditional probability is high and the antecedent is positively probabilistically relevant for the consequent or the probability of the antecedent of the conditional equals 0. In the paper, the truth conditions are defended and some of the logical properties of the proposed semantics are described.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Valid Arguments as True Conditionals.Andrea Iacona - 2023 - Mind 132 (526):428-451.
    This paper explores an idea of Stoic descent that is largely neglected nowadays, the idea that an argument is valid when the conditional formed by the conjunction of its premises as antecedent and its conclusion as consequent is true. As it will be argued, once some basic features of our naıve understanding of validity are properly spelled out, and a suitable account of conditionals is adopted, the equivalence between valid arguments and true conditionals makes perfect sense. The account of validity (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Rethinking the Acceptability and Probability of Indicative Conditionals.Michał Sikorski - 2022 - In Stefan Kaufmann, Over David & Ghanshyam Sharma (eds.), Conditionals: Logic, Linguistics and Psychology. Palgrave-Macmillan.
    The chapter is devoted to the probability and acceptability of indicative conditionals. Focusing on three influential theses, the Equation, Adams’ thesis, and the qualitative version of Adams’ thesis, Sikorski argues that none of them is well supported by the available empirical evidence. In the most controversial case of the Equation, the results of many studies which support it are, at least to some degree, undermined by some recent experimental findings. Sikorski discusses the Ramsey Test, and Lewis’s triviality proof, with special (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Decomposing relevance in conditionals.Daniel Lassiter - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (3):644-668.
    Conditionals frequently convey that the antecedent is relevant to the consequent. Recently many authors have argued that this relevance is part of the conventional meaning of conditionals, but this approach fails to account for many examples where a conditional is used to conveyirrelevance of antecedent to consequent. Both types of conditionals are best explained by a conventional meaning with no relevance requirement, and a separate process of coherence establishment among successive clauses in discourse. This account is supported by the distribution (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • The Ramsey Test and Evidential Support Theory.Michał Sikorski - 2022 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 31 (3):493-504.
    The Ramsey Test is considered to be the default test for the acceptability of indicative conditionals. I will argue that it is incompatible with some of the recent developments in conceptualizing conditionals, namely the growing empirical evidence for the _Relevance Hypothesis_. According to the hypothesis, one of the necessary conditions of acceptability for an indicative conditional is its antecedent being positively probabilistically relevant for the consequent. The source of the idea is _Evidential Support Theory_ presented in Douven (2008). I will (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Probability, Evidential Support, and the Logic of Conditionals.Vincenzo Crupi & Andrea Iacona - 2021 - Argumenta 6:211-222.
    Once upon a time, some thought that indicative conditionals could be effectively analyzed as material conditionals. Later on, an alternative theoretical construct has prevailed and received wide acceptance, namely, the conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent. Partly following critical remarks recently ap- peared in the literature, we suggest that evidential support—rather than conditional probability alone—is key to understand indicative conditionals. There have been motivated concerns that a theory of evidential conditionals (unlike their more tra- ditional counterparts) cannot generate (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • The Logic of the Evidential Conditional.Eric Raidl, Andrea Iacona & Vincenzo Crupi - 2022 - Review of Symbolic Logic 15 (3):758-770.
    In some recent works, Crupi and Iacona have outlined an analysis of ‘if’ based on Chrysippus’ idea that a conditional holds whenever the negation of its consequent is incompatible with its antecedent. This paper presents a sound and complete system of conditional logic that accommodates their analysis. The soundness and completeness proofs that will be provided rely on a general method elaborated by Raidl, which applies to a wide range of systems of conditional logic.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Three Ways of Being Non-Material.Vincenzo Crupi & Andrea Iacona - 2022 - Studia Logica 110:47-93.
    This paper develops a probabilistic analysis of conditionals which hinges on a quantitative measure of evidential support. In order to spell out the interpreta- tion of ‘if’ suggested, we will compare it with two more familiar interpretations, the suppositional interpretation and the strict interpretation, within a formal framework which rests on fairly uncontroversial assumptions. As it will emerge, each of the three interpretations considered exhibits specific logical features that deserve separate consideration.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • The Evidential Conditional.Vincenzo Crupi & Andrea Iacona - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (6):2897-2921.
    This paper outlines an account of conditionals, the evidential account, which rests on the idea that a conditional is true just in case its antecedent supports its consequent. As we will show, the evidential account exhibits some distinctive logical features that deserve careful consideration. On the one hand, it departs from the material reading of ‘if then’ exactly in the way we would like it to depart from that reading. On the other, it significantly differs from the non-material accounts which (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   32 citations  
  • A Conciliatory Answer to the Paradox of the Ravens.William Peden - 2020 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 51 (1):45-64.
    In the Paradox of the Ravens, a set of otherwise intuitive claims about evidence seems to be inconsistent. Most attempts at answering the paradox involve rejecting a member of the set, which seems to require a conflict either with commonsense intuitions or with some of our best confirmation theories. In contrast, I argue that the appearance of an inconsistency is misleading: ‘confirms’ and cognate terms feature a significant ambiguity when applied to universal generalisations. In particular, the claim that some evidence (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Conditionals and inferential connections: toward a new semantics.Igor Douven, Shira Elqayam, Henrik Singmann & Janneke van Wijnbergen-Huitink - 2020 - Thinking and Reasoning 26 (3):311-351.
    In previous published research (“Conditionals and Inferential Connections: A Hypothetical Inferential Theory,” Cognitive Psychology, 2018), we investigated experimentally what role the presence and strength of an inferential connection between a conditional’s antecedent and consequent plays in how people process that conditional. Our analysis showed the strength of that connection to be strongly predictive of whether participants evaluated the conditional as true, false, or neither true nor false. In this article, we re-analyse the data from our previous research, now focussing on (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • Formal Epistemology and the New Paradigm Psychology of Reasoning.Niki Pfeifer & Igor Douven - 2014 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5 (2):199-221.
    This position paper advocates combining formal epistemology and the new paradigm psychology of reasoning in the studies of conditionals and reasoning with uncertainty. The new paradigm psychology of reasoning is characterized by the use of probability theory as a rationality framework instead of classical logic, used by more traditional approaches to the psychology of reasoning. This paper presents a new interdisciplinary research program which involves both formal and experimental work. To illustrate the program, the paper discusses recent work on the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Defending truth values for indicative conditionals.Kelly Weirich - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (6):1635-1657.
    There is strong disagreement about whether indicative conditionals have truth values. In this paper, I present a new argument for the conclusion that indicative conditionals have truth values based on the claim that some true statements entail indicative conditionals. I then address four arguments that conclude that indicative conditionals lack truth values, showing them to be inadequate. Finally, I present further benefits to having a worldly view of conditionals, which supports the assignment of truth values to indicative conditionals. I conclude (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Conditionals, Causality and Conditional Probability.Robert van Rooij & Katrin Schulz - 2018 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 28 (1):55-71.
    The appropriateness, or acceptability, of a conditional does not just ‘go with’ the corresponding conditional probability. A condition of dependence is required as well. In this paper a particular notion of dependence is proposed. It is shown that under both a forward causal and a backward evidential reading of the conditional, this appropriateness condition reduces to conditional probability under some natural circumstances. Because this is in particular the case for the so-called diagnostic reading of the conditional, this analysis might help (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   30 citations  
  • Motivating the Relevance Approach to Conditionals.Niels Skovgaard-Olsen - 2016 - Mind and Language 31 (5):555-579.
    The aim is to motivate theoretically a relevance approach to conditionals in a comparative discussion of the main alternatives. In particular, it will be argued that a relevance approach to conditionals is better motivated than the suppositional theory currently enjoying wide endorsement. In the course of this discussion, an argument will be presented for why failures of the epistemic relevance of the antecedent for the consequent should be counted as genuine semantic defects. Furthermore, strategies for dealing with compositionality and the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • Reasoning about evidence.Igor Douven - 2014 - Journal of Applied Logic 12 (3):263-278.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Ranking Theory and Conditional Reasoning.Niels Skovgaard-Olsen - 2016 - Cognitive Science 40 (4):848-880.
    Ranking theory is a formal epistemology that has been developed in over 600 pages in Spohn's recent book The Laws of Belief, which aims to provide a normative account of the dynamics of beliefs that presents an alternative to current probabilistic approaches. It has long been received in the AI community, but it has not yet found application in experimental psychology. The purpose of this paper is to derive clear, quantitative predictions by exploiting a parallel between ranking theory and a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  • Evidential Support, Transitivity, and Screening-Off.William Roche - 2015 - Review of Symbolic Logic 8 (4):785-806.
    Is evidential support transitive? The answer is negative when evidential support is understood as confirmation so that X evidentially supports Y if and only if p(Y | X) > p(Y). I call evidential support so understood “support” (for short) and set out three alternative ways of understanding evidential support: support-t (support plus a sufficiently high probability), support-t* (support plus a substantial degree of support), and support-tt* (support plus both a sufficiently high probability and a substantial degree of support). I also (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Making Ranking Theory Useful for Psychology of Reasoning.Niels Skovgaard Olsen - 2014 - Dissertation, University of Konstanz
    An organizing theme of the dissertation is the issue of how to make philosophical theories useful for scientific purposes. An argument for the contention is presented that it doesn’t suffice merely to theoretically motivate one’s theories, and make them compatible with existing data, but that philosophers having this aim should ideally contribute to identifying unique and hard to vary predictions of their theories. This methodological recommendation is applied to the ranking-theoretic approach to conditionals, which emphasizes the epistemic relevance and the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • Causal Conditionals, Tendency Causal Claims and Statistical Relevance.Michał Sikorski, van Dongen Noah & Jan Sprenger - 2024 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1:1-26.
    Indicative conditionals and tendency causal claims are closely related (e.g., Frosch and Byrne, 2012), but despite these connections, they are usually studied separately. A unifying framework could consist in their dependence on probabilistic factors such as high conditional probability and statistical relevance (e.g., Adams, 1975; Eells, 1991; Douven, 2008, 2015). This paper presents a comparative empirical study on differences between judgments on tendency causal claims and indicative conditionals, how these judgments are driven by probabilistic factors, and how these factors differ (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Context-indexed Counterfactuals.Mariusz Popieluch - 2022 - Studia Semiotyczne 35 (2):89-123.
    It is commonly believed that the role of context cannot be ignored in the analysis of conditionals, and counterfactuals in particular. On truth conditional accounts involving possible worlds semantics, conditionals have been analysed as expressions of relative necessity: “If A, then B” is true at some world w if B is true at all the A-worlds deemed relevant to the evaluation of the conditional at w. A drawback of this approach is that for the evaluation of conditionals with the same (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Conditionals, Causal Claims and Objectivity.Michał Sikorski - 2020 - Dissertation, Università di Torino
    In my thesis, I develop two distinct themes. The first part of my thesis is devoted to indicative conditionals and approaching them from an empirically informed perspective. In the second part, I am developing classical topics of philosophy of science, specifically, scientific objectivity and the role of values in science, in connection to recent methodological developments, revolving around the Replication Crisis.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Indicatives, concessives, and evidential support.Igor Douven & Sara Verbrugge - 2012 - Thinking and Reasoning 18 (4):480-499.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  • Futher reflections on semantic minimalism: Reply to Wedgwood.Alessandro Capone - 2013 - In Alessandro Capone, Franco Lo Piparo & Marco Carapezza (eds.), Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy. Cham: Springer. pp. 437-474..
    semantic minimalism and moderte contextualism.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • The Lottery Paradox and the Pragmatics of Belief.Igor Douven - 2012 - Dialectica 66 (3):351-373.
    The thesis that high probability suffices for rational belief, while initially plausible, is known to face the Lottery Paradox. The present paper proposes an amended version of that thesis which escapes the Lottery Paradox. The amendment is argued to be plausible on independent grounds.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Why Those Biscuits Are Relevant and on the Sideboard.Robert Rooij & Katrin Schulz - 2021 - Theoria 87 (3):704-712.
    In this paper, we explain why the antecedent of a biscuit conditional is relevant to its consequent by extending Douvenʼs evidential support theory of conditionals making use of utilities. By this extension, we can also explain why a biscuit conditional gives rise to the inference that the consequence is (most likely) true. Finally, we account for the intuition that (indicative) biscuit sentences are false when the antecedent is false and allow for counterfactual biscuits.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Conditional Learning Through Causal Models.Jonathan Vandenburgh - 2020 - Synthese (1-2):2415-2437.
    Conditional learning, where agents learn a conditional sentence ‘If A, then B,’ is difficult to incorporate into existing Bayesian models of learning. This is because conditional learning is not uniform: in some cases, learning a conditional requires decreasing the probability of the antecedent, while in other cases, the antecedent probability stays constant or increases. I argue that how one learns a conditional depends on the causal structure relating the antecedent and the consequent, leading to a causal model of conditional learning. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Confirmation, causation, and Simpson's paradox.Branden Fitelson - 2017 - Episteme 14 (3):297-309.
    ABSTRACTIn this paper, I review some recent treatments of Simpson's Paradox, and I propose a new rationalizing explanation of its paradoxicality.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Rethinking Gibbard’s Riverboat Argument.Karolina Krzyżanowska, Sylvia Wenmackers & Igor Douven - 2014 - Studia Logica 102 (4):771-792.
    According to the Principle of Conditional Non-Contradiction (CNC), conditionals of the form “If p, q” and “If p, not q” cannot both be true, unless p is inconsistent. This principle is widely regarded as an adequacy constraint on any semantics that attributes truth conditions to conditionals. Gibbard has presented an example of a pair of conditionals that, in the context he describes, appear to violate CNC. He concluded from this that conditionals lack truth conditions. We argue that this conclusion is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • Can Pragmatic Humeanism Account for the Counterfactual Invariance of Natural Laws?Marc Lange - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Abductive conditionals as a test case for inferentialism.Patricia Mirabile & Igor Douven - 2020 - Cognition 200 (C):104232.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Learning Conditional Information.Igor Douven - 2012 - Mind and Language 27 (3):239-263.
    Some of the information we receive comes to us in an explicitly conditional form. It is an open question how to model the accommodation of such information in a Bayesian framework. This paper presents data suggesting that there may be no strictly Bayesian account of updating on conditionals. Specifically, the data seem to indicate that such updating at least sometimes proceeds on the basis of explanatory considerations, which famously have no home in standard Bayesian epistemology. The paper also proposes a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • Conditionals As Representative Inferences.Robert van Rooij & Katrin Schulz - 2021 - Axiomathes 31 (3):437-452.
    According to Adams, the acceptability of an indicative conditional goes with the conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent. However, some conditionals seem to be inappropriate, although their corresponding conditional probability is high. These are cases with a missing link between antecedent and consequent. Other conditionals are appropriate even though the conditional probability is low. Finally, we have the so-called biscuit conditionals. In this paper we will generalize analyses of Douven and others to account for the appropriateness of conditionals (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)Difference-making conditionals and the relevant Ramsey test.Hans Rott - 2022 - Review of Symbolic Logic 15 (1):133-164.
    This article explores conditionals expressing that the antecedent makes a difference for the consequent. A ‘relevantised’ version of the Ramsey Test for conditionals is employed in the context of the classical theory of belief revision. The idea of this test is that the antecedent is relevant to the consequent in the following sense: a conditional is accepted just in case the consequent is accepted if the belief state is revised by the antecedent and the consequent fails to be accepted if (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  • Distinguishing semantics, pragmatics, and reasoning in the theory of conditionals.Daniel Lassiter - 2011 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Between a conditional’s antecedent and its consequent: Discourse coherence vs. probabilistic relevance.Karolina Krzyżanowska, Peter J. Collins & Ulrike Hahn - 2017 - Cognition 164 (C):199-205.
    Reasoning with conditionals is central to everyday life, yet there is long-standing disagreement about the meaning of the conditional. One example is the puzzle of so-called missing-link conditionals such as "if raccoons have no wings, they cannot breathe under water." Their oddity may be taken to show that conditionals require a connection between antecedent ("raccoons have no wings") and consequent ("they cannot breathe under water"), yet most accounts of conditionals attribute the oddity to natural language pragmatics. We present an experimental (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • How to account for the oddness of missing-link conditionals.Igor Douven - 2017 - Synthese 194 (5).
    Conditionals whose antecedent and consequent are not somehow internally connected tend to strike us as odd. The received doctrine is that this felt oddness is to be explained pragmatically. Exactly how the pragmatic explanation is supposed to go has remained elusive, however. This paper discusses recent philosophical and psychological work that attempts to account semantically for the apparent oddness of conditionals lacking an internal connection between their parts.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  • The hypothetico-probabilistic (HP-) method as a concretization of the HD-method.T. Kuipers - 2007 - In Sami Pihlström, Panu Raatikainen & Matti Sintonen (eds.), Approaching truth: essays in honour of Ilkka Niiniluoto. London: College Publications. pp. 179--207.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Why Those Biscuits Are Relevant and on the Sideboard.Robert van Rooij & Katrin Schulz - 2021 - Theoria 87 (3):704-712.
    In this paper, we explain why the antecedent of a biscuit conditional is relevant to its consequent by extending Douvenʼs evidential support theory of conditionals making use of utilities. By this extension, we can also explain why a biscuit conditional gives rise to the inference that the consequence is (most likely) true. Finally, we account for the intuition that (indicative) biscuit sentences are false when the antecedent is false and allow for counterfactual biscuits.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • (1 other version)Aristotle's thesis and the biconditional interpretation of conditional statements.Miguel López Astorga - 2013 - Alpha (Osorno) 37:237-248.
    Pfeifer defiende que los seres humanos no interpretan los enunciados condicionales como condicionales materiales, sino como eventos condicionales. Para probarlo, plantea dos experimentos basados en la tesis de Aristóteles y, a partir de los resultados que obtiene, argumenta que es obvio que sus participantes entendieron los enunciados condicionales que se les presentaron como eventos condicionales. No obstante, si tenemos en cuenta el fenómeno de la perfección del condicional y que los enunciados condicionales pueden ser interpretados como bicondicionales, se puede pensar (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark