Abstract
The truthful speaker wants not to assert falsehoods, wherefore he is willing to assert only what he takes to be very probably true. He deems it permissible to assert that A only if P(A) is sufficiently close to 1, where P is the probability function that represents his system of degrees of belief at the time. Assertability goes by subjective probability.
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Notes
Ernest Adams, ‘The Logic of Conditionals’, Inquiry 8 (1965), 166–197
Ernest Adams, ‘Probability and the Logic of Conditionals’, Aspects of Inductive Logic, ed. by Jaakko Hintikka and Patrick Suppes, Dordrecht, 1966. I shall not here consider Adams’s subsequent work, which differs at least in emphasis.
Richard Jeffrey, ‘If’ (abstract), Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964), 702–703
Brian Ellis, ‘An Epistemological Concept of Truth’, Contemporary Philosophy in Australia, ed. by Rober Brown and C. D. Rollins, London, 1969
Robert Stalnaker, ‘Probability and Conditionals’, Philosophy of Science, 37 (1970), 64–80. We shall consider later whether to count Adams as another adherent of the thesis.
I am indebted to Bas van Fraassen for this observation. He has also shown that by judicious selection of the B’s we can give → some further properties that might seem appropriate to a conditional connective. See Bas van Fraassen, ‘Probabilities of Conditionals’, in Foundations of Probability Theory, Statistical Inference and Statistical Theories of Science, Volume I, ed. by W. Harper and C. A. Hooker, D. Reidel, Dordrecht, Holland, 1976, p. 261.
These reasons may be found in Paul Teller, ‘Conditionalization and Observation’, Synthese 26 (1973), 218–258.
H. P. Grice, ‘Logic and Conversation’, The William James Lectures, given at Harvard University in 1967.
‘Probabilities and Conditionals’. The Stalnaker conditional had been introduced in Robert Stalnaker, ‘A Theory of Conditionals’, Studies in Logical Theory, ed. by Nicholas Rescher, Oxford, 1968. I have discussed the Stalnaker conditional in Counter-factuals, Oxford, 1973, pp. 77–83, arguing there that an interpretation quite similar to Stalnaker’s is right for counterfactuals but wrong for indicative conditionals.
A Theory of Conditionals’, p. 102.
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© 1976 David Lewis
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Lewis, D. (1976). Probabilities of Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities. In: Harper, W.L., Stalnaker, R., Pearce, G. (eds) IFS. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9117-0_6
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