Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

In this paper, we apply a Herzberger-style semantics to deal with the question: is the de Finetti conditional a conditional? The question is pressing, in view of the inferential behavior of the de Finetti conditional: it allows for inferences that seem quite unexpected for a conditional. The semantics we advance here for the de Finetti conditional is simply the classical semantics for material conditional, with a further dimension whose understanding depends on the kind of application one has in mind. We discuss such possible applications and how they cover ground already advanced in the literature.

If one is looking for controversy, then, one just needs to check debates on the meaning of conditionals. A quite intuitive idea behind it concerns the claim that asserting an indicative conditional  is not the same as making a single assertion. Rather, one makes a conditional assertion: it amounts to assuming the antecedent  and, based on that, reason on whether or not to assert . This kind of approach leads one to the following evaluation of a conditional: assuming that  is the case, the conditional will be true in case  is true, and the conditional will be false in case  is…

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