A Ranking‐Theoretic Approach to Conditionals

Abstract

Conditionals somehow express conditional beliefs. However, conditional belief is a bi-propositional attitude that is generally not truth-evaluable, in contrast to unconditional belief. Therefore, this article opts for an expressivistic semantics for conditionals, grounds this semantics in the arguably most adequate account of conditional belief, that is, ranking theory, and dismisses probability theory for that purpose, because probabilities cannot represent belief. Various expressive options are then explained in terms of ranking theory, with the intention to set out a general interpretive scheme that is able to account for the most variegated usage of conditionals. The Ramsey test is only the first option. Relevance is another, familiar, but little understood item, which comes in several versions. This article adds a further family of expressive options, which is able to subsume also counterfactuals and causal conditionals, and indicates at the end how this family allows for partial recovery of truth conditions for conditionals.

The epistemic account of ceteris paribus conditions

“…15.3)). This point is also at the heart of my epistemic account of conditionals in Spohn (2013). And this is precisely why the epistemic interpretation can be more successful than the search for truth conditions.…”

“…This is a related topic. and therefore I have applied the same theoretical tools to the topic of conditionals in Spohn (2013) as I will do here.…”

Why follow the royal rule?

“…On this latter view conditionals do not have truth values, but express the uttering or thinking agent's conditional state of mind rather than a state of affairs that may or may not obtain in the external reality. The latter view is prominent for indicative conditionals (Adams 1975), but some also adopt it for counterfactual conditionals (Edgington 2008;Spohn 2013Spohn , 2015. This paper is concerned with counterfactual conditionals and assumes that they express propositions that are true or false.…”

Motivating the Relevance Approach to Conditionals

“…However, although this inference may be reasonable in contexts where one has evidence for either A or C without knowing which one holds, and one is in the process of eliminating alternatives, it cannot be accepted as a general principle of reasoning (cf. Spohn, ). The reason is that in combination with disjunction‐introduction, it would validate the following argument schema: …”