Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.
Cognition. 2010 Dec;117(3):302-18. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.08.015. Epub 2010 Oct 18.
According to Adams's Thesis, the acceptability of an indicative conditional sentence goes by the conditional probability of its consequent given its antecedent. We test, for the first time, whether this thesis is descriptively correct and show that it is not; in particular, we show that it yields the wrong predictions for people's judgments of the acceptability of important subclasses of the class of inferential conditionals. Experimental results are presented that reveal an interaction effect between, on the one hand, the type of inferential connection between a conditional's antecedent and its consequent and, on the other, the judged acceptability of the conditional in relation to the conditional probability of its consequent given its antecedent. Specifically, these results suggest a family of theses, each pertaining to a different type of conditional, about how conditionals relate to the relevant conditional probabilities.
根据亚当斯的论文,一个直言条件句的可接受性取决于其前件给定后件的条件概率。我们首次检验了这一论文在描述上是否正确,并表明它不正确;具体来说,我们表明它对人们判断推理条件句这一类重要子类的可接受性的预测是错误的。实验结果揭示了一种交互效应,一方面是条件句的前件和后件之间的推理关系的类型,另一方面是条件句在与前件给定后件的条件概率的关系中的可接受性判断。具体来说,这些结果提出了一系列论文,每一篇都涉及到不同类型的条件句与相关条件概率的关系。