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Abstract

To adjudicate between deterministic and probabilistic accounts of the meaning of conditionals, we examined the influence of context on the reading of general conditionals. Context was varied with the contrast context, where participants judged uncertain conditionals after certain conditionals, and the control context, where participants judged only uncertain conditionals. Experiment 1 had participants to judge whether a set of truth table cases was possible for the conditional. Experiment 2 had participants to judge whether the conditional was true for a set of truth table cases. The findings are as follows. Possibility and truth judgments showed a similar response pattern. The reading of general conditionals varied with conditional contexts. The predominant reading was deterministic in the contrast context but was probabilistic in the control context. Conditional contexts yielded a significant contrast effect. Meanwhile, conditional probability P(q|p) made a smaller difference to the acceptance rate in the contrast context than in the control context. The overall pattern is beyond both the deterministic and probabilistic accounts. Alternatively, we propose a dynamic-threshold account for the relative reading of general conditionals.

Keywords

General conditionals reading contexts contrast effects the dynamic-threshold account

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The contrast effect in reading general conditionals

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