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 |
|---|---|
| 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 / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)
- Probability
- Supposition
- Counterfactuals
- Triviality
- Decision theory