Ramsey's Lost Counterfactual

History and Philosophy of Logic 44 (3):311-326 (2022)
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Abstract

In contemporary works on conditionals, the Ramsey test is a procedure for the evaluation of conditional sentences. There are several versions of the test, all inspired by a footnote by the British philosopher and mathematician Frank Ramsey, in his General Propositions and Causality. However, no study on Ramsey's own account of conditionals has been put forth so far. Furthermore, the footnote seems to cover indicative conditionals only, and this has led to the belief that no account of counterfactuals can be found in Ramsey's work. In this paper, I recover Ramsey's account of counterfactuals and show that it is sketched in the footnote too. The result is a well-developed account of counterfactuals that resembles many contemporary ones. But Ramsey uses the same approach also for other types of conditionals, and this casts doubts on the current criteria for the classification of this type of sentences.

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Caterina Sisti
Università di Torino

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References found in this work

Counterfactuals.David Lewis - 1973 - Foundations of Language 13 (1):145-151.
Truth and probability.Frank Ramsey - 1926 - In Antony Eagle (ed.), Philosophy of Probability: Contemporary Readings. Routledge. pp. 52-94.
On conditionals.Dorothy Edgington - 1995 - Mind 104 (414):235-329.
Philosophical Guide to Conditionals.Jonathan Bennett - 2003 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.

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