The probability of conditionals: The psychological evidence
By David E. Over, Jonathan Evans. 2003
151 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The two main psychological theories of the ordinary conditional were designed to account for inferences made from assumptions, but few premises in everyday life can be simply assumed true. Useful premises usually have a probability that is less than certainty. But what is the probability of the ordinary conditional and how is it determined? We argue that people use a two stage Ramsey test that we specify to make probability judgements about indicative conditionals in natural language, and we describe experiments that support this conclusion. Our account can explain why most people give the conditional probability as the probability of the conditional, but also why some give the conjunctive probability. We discuss how our psychological work is related to the analysis of ordinary indicative conditionals in philosophical logic.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, General Decision Sciences, History and Philosophy of Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3eb008cabca25cfbd8199a213dfe87b2d929ef31
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Cognitive Neuroscience
In General Decision Sciences
- David E. Over
- Angelo Gilio
- Gernot D. Kleiter
- PD Dr. Dr. Niki Pfeifer
- Mike Oaksford
- Jean Baratgin
- N. Chater
In History and Philosophy of Science
Citations in the corpus
- Betting on conditionals (2010, unknown): “These include “basic” indicative conditionals about simple frequency distributions and indicative conditionals like (1) that could be called “causal” (Evans, Handley, & Over, 2003 ; Fugard, Pfeifer, Mayerhofer, & Kleiter, 2010 ; Oberauer & Wilhelm, 2003 ; Over & Evans, 2003 ; Over et al, 2007 )”
- The conditional in mental probability logic (2010, background): “Examples are nonmonotonic reasoning, possibility theory [3], logic programming [61, 62], probabilistic approaches [41, 11, 43, 42, 37, 36, 19, 46, 47, 44] .”
- The psychology of inferring conditionals from disjunctions: A probabilistic study (2012, result): “…the conditional probability hypothesis was strongly supported in this way in these experiments (Evans et al., 2003; Oberauer & Wilhelm, 2003; Over & Evans, 2003; see Over et al., 2007, for confirmation of the conditional probability hypothesis for conditionals that do not refer to a known…”