Probabilities of conditionals: Updating Adams

Abstract

The problem of probabilities of conditionals is one of the long‐standing puzzles in philosophy of language. We defend and update Adams' solution to the puzzle: the probability of an epistemic conditional is not the probability of a proposition, but a probability under a supposition.Close inspection of how a triviality result unfolds in a concrete scenario does not provide counterexamples to the view that probabilities of conditionals are conditional probabilities: instead, it supports the conclusion that probabilities of conditionals violate standard probability theory.This does not call into question probability theory per se; rather, it calls for a more careful understanding of its role: probability theory is a theory of probabilities of propositions; but as conditionals do not express propositions, their probabilities are not subject to the standard laws.We argue that both conditional probabilities and probabilities of conditionals are best understood in terms of the dynamics of supposing, modeled as a restriction operation on a probability space. This version of the suppositionalist view allows us to connect Adams' Thesis to the widely held restrictor view of the semantics of conditionals.We address two common objections to Adams' view: that the relevant probabilities are ‘probabilities only in name’, and that giving up conditional propositions puts us at a disadvantage when it comes to interpreting compounds.Finally, we argue that some putative counterexamples to Adams' Thesis can be diagnosed as fallacies of probabilistic reasoning: they arise from applying to conditionals laws of standard probability theory which are invalid for them.