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DIFFERENCE-MAKING CONDITIONALS AND THE RELEVANT RAMSEY TEST

Part of: General logic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2019

HANS ROTT
HANS ROTT*
Affiliation:
DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF REGENSBURG93040REGENSBURGGERMANYE-mail: hans.rott@ur.de
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Abstract

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This article explores conditionals expressing that the antecedent makes a difference for the consequent. A ‘relevantised’ version of the Ramsey Test for conditionals is employed in the context of the classical theory of belief revision. The idea of this test is that the antecedent is relevant to the consequent in the following sense: a conditional is accepted just in case (i) the consequent is accepted if the belief state is revised by the antecedent and (ii) the consequent fails to be accepted if the belief state is revised by the antecedent’s negation. The connective thus defined violates almost all of the traditional principles of conditional logic, but it obeys an interesting logic of its own. The article also gives the logic of an alternative version, the ‘Dependent Ramsey Test,’ according to which a conditional is accepted just in case (i) the consequent is accepted if the belief state is revised by the antecedent and (ii) the consequent is rejected (e.g., its negation is accepted) if the belief state is revised by the antecedent’s negation. This conditional is closely related to David Lewis’s counterfactual analysis of causation.

Keywords

conditionalsrelevancedependenceRamsey Testbelief revision

MSC classification

Primary: 03B42: Logics of knowledge and belief (including belief change) 03B45: Modal logic (including the logic of norms)
Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Symbolic Logic , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 2022 , pp. 133 - 164
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Copyright
© Association for Symbolic Logic, 2020

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