Outlines of Scepticism, by the Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus, is a work of major importance. It is the fullest extant account of ancient Scepticism, and also one of our most copious sources of information about the other Hellenistic philosophies. Moreover, the rediscovery of Sextus in the sixteenth century brought about a revolution in philosophy. Anyone interested in the history of philosophy must have at least an acquaintance with Sextus, and for students of Hellenistic philosophy his writings are indispensable. Julia Annas (...) and Jonathan Barnes provide an accurate and readable English translation of the Outlines, with a short introduction and brief annotation. (shrink)

(2014). Capturing the relationship between conditionals and conditional probability with a trivalent semantics. Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics: Vol. 24, Three-Valued Logics and their Applications, pp. 144-152. doi: 10.1080/11663081.2014.911535.

The new paradigm in the psychology of reasoning adopts a Bayesian, or prob- abilistic, model for studying human reasoning. Contrary to the traditional binary approach based on truth functional logic, with its binary values of truth and falsity, a third value that represents uncertainty can be introduced in the new paradigm. A variety of three-valued truth table systems are available in the formal literature, including one proposed by de Finetti. We examine the descriptive adequacy of these systems for natural language (...) indicative condi- tionals and bets on conditionals. Within our framework the so-called “defective” truth table, in which participants choose a third value when the antecedent of the indicative conditional is false, becomes a coherent response. We show that only de Finetti’s system has a good descriptive fit when uncer- tainty is the third value. (shrink)

This collection of essays is on the relation between probabilities, especially conditional probabilities, and conditionals. It provides negative results which sharply limit the ways conditionals can be related to conditional probabilities. There are also positive ideas and results which will open up areas of research. The collection is intended to honour Ernest W. Adams, whose seminal work is largely responsible for creating this area of inquiry. As well as describing, evaluating, and applying Adams's work the contributions extend his ideas in (...) directions he may or may not have anticipated, but that he certainly inspired. In addition to a wide range of philosophers of science, the volume should interest computer scientists and linguists. (shrink)