Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

There are two major research projects on indicative conditionals: the semantic project of determining their truth conditions, and the epistemological project of how we should reason with them, and when they are probable or assertable. This paper integrates both projects on the basis of a trivalent, truth-functional account of the truth conditions of conditionals. This account generalizes a logic of deductive inference (i.e., with certain premises) to conditionals and it yields an account of the probability of conditionals, which validates The Equation (=Adams's Thesis), is immune to the triviality results and generates an attractive conditional logic for uncertain reasoning. Hence, we obtain a unified theory of the truth conditions and probability of conditionals that outperforms competing conditional logics and yields an insightful analysis of the controversy about the validity of Modus Ponens.