Online research in philosophy

Draft of a paper for the Sinn und Bedeutung 14 conference. Explains how to capture the link between conditionals the probability of indicative conditionals and conditional probability using a classical semantics for conditionals. (Note: some introductory material is shared with a twin paper, "Capturing the Relationship Between Conditionals and Conditional Probability with a Trivalent Semantics".).

I defend a formulation of the Ramsey Test with a condition for accepting negations of conditionals. It is implicit in the assumptions of the triviality theorems of Gärdenfors, Harper, and Lewis; and it allows for a unified proof of those theorems, from weaker assumptions about belief revision. This leads to a proof of McGee’s thesis that iterated conditionals do not obey modus ponens. †To contact the author, please write to: Institute of Philosophy, University of Leuven, Kardinaal Mercierplein 2, B‐3000 Leuven, Belgium; e‐mail: etlin@alum.mit.edu.

Conventional wisdom has it that many intriguing features of indicative conditionals aren’t shared by subjunctive conditionals. Subjunctive morphology is common in discussions of wishes and wants, however, and conditionals are commonly used in such discussions as well. As a result such discussions are a good place to look for subjunctive conditionals that exhibit features usually associated with indicatives alone. Here I offer subjunctive versions of J. L. Austin’s ‘biscuit’ conditionals—e.g., “There are biscuits on the sideboard if you want them”—and subjunctive versions of Allan Gibbard’s ‘stand-off’ or ‘Sly Pete’ conditionals, in which speakers with no relevant false beliefs can in the same context felicitously assert conditionals with the same antecedents and contradictory consequents. My cases undercut views according to which the indicative/subjunctive divide marks a great difference in the meaning of conditionals. They also make trouble for treatments of indicative conditionals that cannot readily be generalized to subjunctives.

In “The Concept of the Irreplaceable,” John N. Martin claims that utilitarian arguments can explain the environmentalist position concerning the preservation of natural objects as long as human attitudes toward preservation are considered along with the direct benefits of environmental preservation. But this type of utilitarian justification is biased in favor of the satisfaction of human preferences. No ethical theory which calculates goodness in terms of the amount of human satisfaction can present an adequate justification of environmental preservation. Since human interests must be considered primary, natural objects will only be preserved when their preservation is in accord with human preferences.

This collection introduces the reader to some of the most interesting current work on conditionals. Particular attention is paid to possible world semantics for conditionals, the role of conditional probability in helping us to understand conditionals, implicature and the material conditional, and subjunctive versus indicative conditionals. Contributors include V.H. Dudman, Dorothy Edgington, Nelson Goodman, H.P. Grice, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker.

Mackie, J. L. Causes and conditions.--Taylor, R. The metaphysics of causation.--Scriven, M. Defects of the necessary condition analysis of causation.--Kim, J. Causes and events: Mackie on causation.--Anscombe, G. E. M. Causality and determination.--Davidson, D. Causal relations.--Wright, G. H. von. On the logic and epistemology of the causal relation.--Ducasse, C. J. On the nature and the observability of the causal relation.--Sellars, W. S. Counterfactuals.--Chisholm, R. M. Law statements and counterfactual inference.--Rescher, N. Belief-contravening suppositions and the problem of contrary-to-fact conditionals.--Stalnaker, R. A theory of conditionals.--Lewis, D. Causation.--Kim, J. Causes and counterfactuals.

Subjunctivitis is the doctrine that what is distinctive about knowledge is essential modal in character, and thus is captured by certain subjunctive conditionals. One principal formulation of subjunctivism invokes a ``sensitivity condition'' (Nozick, De Rose), the other invokes a ``safety condition'' (Sosa). It is shown in detail how defects in the sensitivity condition generate unwanted results, and that the virtues of that condition are merely apparent. The safety condition is untenable also, because it is too easily satisfied. A powerful motivation for adopting subjunctivism would be that it provides a solution to the problem of misleading evidence, but in fact, it does not.

This paper is chiefly aimed at individuating some deep, but as yet almost unnoticed, similarities between Aristotle's syllogistic and the Stoic doctrine of conditionals, notably between Aristotle's metasyllogistic equimodality condition (as stated at APr. I 24, 41b27–31) and truth-conditions for third type (Chrysippean) conditionals (as they can be inferred from, say, S.E. P. II 111 and 189). In fact, as is shown in §1, Aristotle's condition amounts to introducing in his (propositional) metasyllogistic a non-truthfunctional implicational arrow '', the truth-conditions of which turn out to be logically equivalent to truth-conditions of third type conditionals, according to which only the impossible (and not the possible) follows from the impossible. Moreover, Aristotle is given precisely this non-Scotian conditional logic in two so far overlooked passages of (Latin and Hebraic translations of) Themistius' Paraphrasis of De Caelo (CAG V 4, 71.8–13 and 47.8–10 Landauer). Some further consequences of Aristotle's equimodality condition on his logic, and notably on his syllogistic (no matter whether modal or not), are pointed out and discussed at length. A (possibly Chrysippean) extension of Aristotle's condition is also discussed, along with a full characterization of truth-conditions of fourth type conditionals.

Epistemic conditionals have often been thought to satisfy the Ramsey test (RT): If A, then B is acceptable in a belief state G if and only if B should be accepted upon revising G with A. But as Peter Gärdenfors has shown, RT conflicts with the intuitively plausible condition of Preservation on belief revision. We investigate what happens if (a) RT is retained while Preservation is weakened, or (b) vice versa. We also generalize Gärdenfors' approach by treating belief revision as a relation rather than as a function.In our semantic approach, the same relation is used to model belief revision and to give truth-conditions for conditionals. The approach validates a weak version of the Ramsey Test (WRR) — essentially, a restriction of RT to maximally consistent belief states.

Bradley has argued that a truth-conditional semantics for conditionals is incompatible with an allegedly very weak and intuitively compelling constraint on the interpretation of conditionals. I argue that the example Bradley offers to motivate this constraint can be explained along pragmatic lines that are compatible with the correctness of at least one popular truth-conditional semantics for conditionals.