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Revisiting McGee’s Probabilistic Analysis of Conditionals
KTH, School of Architecture and the Built Environment (ABE), Philosophy and History.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-9934-3833
2022 (English)In: Journal of Philosophical Logic, ISSN 0022-3611, E-ISSN 1573-0433, Vol. 51, no 5, p. 973-1017Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

This paper calls for a re-appraisal of McGee’s analysis of the semantics, logic and probabilities of indicative conditionals presented in his 1989 paper Conditional probabilities and compounds of conditionals. The probabilistic measures introduced by McGee are given a new axiomatisation—built on the principle that the antecedent of a conditional is probabilistically independent of the conditional—and a more transparent method of constructing such measures is provided. McGee’s Dutch book argument is restructured to more clearly reveal that it introduces a novel contribution to the epistemology of semantic indeterminacy, and shows that its more controversial implications are unavoidable if we want to maintain the Ramsey Test along with the standard laws of probability. Importantly, it is shown that the counterexamples that have been levelled at McGee’s analysis—generating a rather wide consensus that it yields ‘unintuitive’ or ‘wrong’ probabilities for compounds —fail to strike at their intended target; for to honour the intuitions of the counterexamples one must either give up the Ramsey Test or the standard laws of probability. It will be argued that we need to give up neither if we take the counterexamples as further evidence that the indicative conditional sometimes allows for a non-epistemic ‘causal’ interpretation alongside its usual epistemic interpretation. 

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Springer Nature , 2022. Vol. 51, no 5, p. 973-1017
Keywords [en]
Compounds of conditionals, Probability of conditionals, Sequence semantics
National Category
Philosophy
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-323266DOI: 10.1007/s10992-022-09657-5ISI: 000788035300003Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85128872155OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-323266DiVA, id: diva2:1730216
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QC 20230124

Available from: 2023-01-24 Created: 2023-01-24 Last updated: 2023-01-24Bibliographically approved

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Cantwell, John

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