The psychology of indicative conditionals and conditional bets

There is a new Bayesian, or probabilistic, paradigm in the psychology of reasoning, with new psychological accounts of the indicative conditional of natural language. In psychological experiments in this new paradigm, people judge that the probability of the indicative conditional, P(if A then C), is the conditional probability of C given A, P(C | A). In other experiments, participants respond with what has been called the 'de- fective' truth table: they judge that if A then C is true when A holds and C holds, is false when A holds and C does not, and is neither true nor false when A does not hold. We argue that these responses are not 'defective' in any negative sense, as many psychologists have implied. We point out that a number of normative researchers, including de Finetti, have proposed such a table for various coherent interpretations of the third value. We review the relevant general tables in the normative literature, in which there is a third value for A and C and the logically compound forms of the natural language conditional, negation, conjunction, disjunction, and the material conditional. We describe the results of an experiment on which of these tables best describes ordinary people's judgements when the third value is interpreted as indicating uncertainty.

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Source https://hal.science/ijn_00834585
Author Baratgin, Jean, Politzer, G., Over, D.P.
Maintainer CCSD
Last Updated May 10, 2026, 17:10 (UTC)
Created May 10, 2026, 17:10 (UTC)
Identifier ijn_00834585
Language en
Rights https://about.hal.science/hal-authorisation-v1/
contributor Institut Jean-Nicod (IJN) ; Département d'Etudes Cognitives - ENS-PSL (DEC) ; École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS-PSL) ; Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS-PSL) ; Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS)-Collège de France (CdF (institution))-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Département de Philosophie - ENS-PSL ; École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS-PSL) ; Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)-Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL)
creator Baratgin, Jean
date 2013-01-15T00:00:00
harvest_object_id 46f6423f-89bd-4944-9389-36f14df098c8
harvest_source_id 3374d638-d20b-4672-ba96-a23232d55657
harvest_source_title test moissonnage SELUNE
metadata_modified 2025-11-04T00:00:00
set_spec type:UNDEFINED