Dear all, This coming Wednesday Dorothy Edgington (Birkbeck) will be giving a paper entitled “Indeterminacy and Conditionals” (abstract below) at the Serious Metaphysics Group.
As usual, the seminar will run from 4.30 to 6.00pm in the Philosophy Faculty Board Room. Hope to see you there, Carlo Abstract: Many conditionals with false antecedents seem to have no determinate truth value, and yet they can be assigned probabilities or judged to be probable or improbable, e.g. 'If you had picked a red ball it would have had a black spot' (when 90% of the red balls have black spots); 'If I had approached, the dog would have attacked'; 'If you had had the operation, you would have been cured'. I defend a way of treating this indeterminacy, which can also be applied to vague statements, and show that it is compatible with the conditionals having truth conditions, although it is often indeterminate what their truth value is. The truth conditions are due to a construction by Richard Bradley, who, with an adaption of Stalnaker's semantics, shows how assessing conditionals by conditional probability is not after all incompatible with their having truth conditions. _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
