Abstract
There seem to be two ways of supposing a proposition: supposing “indicatively” that Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet, it is likely that someone else did; supposing “subjunctively” that Shakespeare hadn’t written Hamlet, it is likely that nobody would have written the play. Let P(B//A) be the probability of B on the subjunctive supposition that A. Is P(B//A) equal to the probability of the corresponding counterfactual, A□→B? I review recent triviality arguments against this hypothesis and argue that they do not succeed. On the other hand, I argue that even if we can equate P(B//A) with P(A□→B), we still need an account of how subjunctive conditional probabilities are related to unconditional probabilities. The triviality arguments reveal that the connection is not as straightforward as one might have hoped.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 47-66 |
Journal | Journal of Philosophical Logic |
Volume | 47 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 14 Nov 2016 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 28 Feb 2018 |
Keywords
- Probability
- Supposition
- Counterfactuals
- Triviality
- Decision theory