Abstract
Talk of conditionals rather than hypotheticals, and of conditional probabilities rather than degrees of confirmation. Also, write ‘A → B’ for ‘If A, then B’, ‘P(A, B)’ for ‘The conditional probability of A on (or given) B’, and ‘T’ for ‘¬(A & ¬A)’, A here some fixed but arbitrary statement. The conditionals Jeffrey advocates then are those which issue from, and hence for which P meets, this constraint
hence this one
We might then define a sense of ‘if’ by saying that the degree of confirmation of a hypothetical on evidence e is the degree to which e, conjoined with the antecedent, confirms the consequent.
—Richard C. Jeffrey1
“If,” Journal of Philosophy 61, pp. 702–703, 1964.
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Leblanc, H., Roeper, P. (1990). Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities: Three Triviality Theorems. In: Kyburg, H.E., Loui, R.P., Carlson, G.N. (eds) Knowledge Representation and Defeasible Reasoning. Studies in Cognitive Systems, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0553-5_12
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