Abstract
The Ramsey Test is considered to be the default test for the acceptability of indicative conditionals. I will argue that it is incompatible with some of the recent developments in conceptualizing conditionals, namely the growing empirical evidence for the Relevance Hypothesis. According to the hypothesis, one of the necessary conditions of acceptability for an indicative conditional is its antecedent being positively probabilistically relevant for the consequent. The source of the idea is Evidential Support Theory presented in Douven (2008). I will defend the hypothesis against alleged counterexamples, and show that it is supported by growing empirical evidence. Finally, I will present a version of the Ramsey test which incorporates the relevance condition and therefore is consistent with growing empirical evidence for the relevance hypothesis.
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Notes
The source of this formulation is Douven (2008).
I use the version from Douven and Verbrugge (2012).
For a detailed discussion of the difference between the two notions and an experiment indicating that \(\Delta P\) predicts intuitive relevance better than the difference measure, see Skovgaard-Olsen et al. (2017).
The examples Bennett used are: “If George told them about our plan, he broke a promise to me.” and “If he didn’t tell them about our plan, he broke a promise to you.”, where “me” and “you” refer to the same person.
Obviously, we can fix the probability of the consequent as high as we want without making the antecedent probabilistically relevant for it.
Similar examples were used in an experiments described in Douven and Verbrugge (2012) or Skovgaard-Olsen et al. (2016). The results of the experiments presented in the second paper suggest that neither acceptability nor probability of conditionals generally corresponds to the conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jan Sprenger, Borut Trpin, Igor Douven, Vincenzo Crupi and the anonymous referees for their useful comments.
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There are no conflicts of interest. The research was supported by Starting Investigator Grant No. 640638 (“OBJECTIVITY—Making Scientific Inferences More Objective”) of the European Research Council (ERC).
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Sikorski, M. The Ramsey Test and Evidential Support Theory. J of Log Lang and Inf 31, 493–504 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10849-022-09364-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10849-022-09364-z