Conditionals, Causality and Conditional Probability

The appropriateness, or acceptability, of a conditional does not just ‘go with’ the corresponding conditional probability. A condition of dependence is required as well (cf. Douven in Synthese 164:19–44, 2008, The epistemology of indicative conditionals. Formal and empirical approaches. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016; Skovgaard-Olsen et al. in Cognition 150:26–36, 2016). In this paper a particular notion of dependence is proposed. It is shown that under both a forward causal and a backward evidential (or diagnostic) 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 to explain some of Douven and Verbrugge’s (Cognition 117:302–318, 2010) empirical observations.

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