Abstract
How to accept a conditional? F. P. Ramsey proposed the following test in (Ramsey 1990).
(RT) ‘If A, then B’ must be accepted with respect to the current epistemic state iff the minimal hypothetical change of it needed to accept A also requires accepting B.
In this article we propose a formulation of (RT), which unlike some of its predecessors, is compatible with our best theory of belief revision, the so-called AGM theory (see (Gärdenfors 1988), chapters 1–5 for a survey). The new test, which, we claim, encodes some of the crucial insights defended by F. P. Ramsey in (Ramsey 1990), is used to study the conditionals epistemically validated by the AGM postulates. Our notion of validity (PV) is compared with the notion of negative validity (NV) used by Gärdenfors in (Gärdenfors 1988). It is observed that the notions of PV and NV will in general differ and that when these differences arise it is the notion of PV that is preferable. Finally we compare our formulation of the Ramsey test with a previous formulation offered by Gärdenfors (GRT). We show that any attempt to interpret (GRT) as delivering acceptance conditions for Ramsey's conditionals is doomed to failure.
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We would like to thank John Collins, Andre Fuhrmann, Peter Gärdenfors, Sven Ove Hansson, Arnold Koslow, Sten Lindström, David Makinson, Judea Pearl and Wlodek Rabinowicz for helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks are also due to two anonymous referees for thought-provoking criticism and comments.
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Costa, H.A., Levi, I. Two notions of epistemic validity. Synthese 109, 217–262 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00413768
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00413768