Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Many issues are amplified when reasoning with nested conditionals is placed under scrutiny. Two pilot studies were conducted to examine how reasoning with uncertain and certain (left-nested) conditionals proceeds. 

The first pilot study extended the experiment from (Van Wijnbergen-Huitink et al., 2014) to uncertain left-nested conditionals. The results suggest that uncertain left-nested conditionals are interpreted as Adams conditionals. 

The second pilot study tested the formal property that the probability of material conditionals equals the corresponding conditional probability if the conditionals are certain. Only around a third of responses were fully matching and around two thirds had at most one mismatch, which raises a number of questions and provides an interesting insight in the gap between the theoretical predictions and actual responses.