Lewis argued that ‘there is no way to interpret a conditional connective so that, with sufficient generality, the probabilities of conditionals will equal the appropriate conditional probabilities’. However, as Lewis and others have subsequently recognized, Lewis' triviality results go through only on the assumption that ‘if’ is not context-sensitive. This leaves a question that has not been adequately addressed: what are the prospects of a context-sensitive theory of ‘if’ that complies with Stalnaker's thesis? I offer one interesting constraint on any (...) such theory. I argue that no context-sensitive theory satisfies Stalnaker's thesis if it satisfies three plausible assumptions: first, that the truth of an indicative is determined by the world of evaluation and by the set of worlds in the relevant epistemic context in which the antecedent is true; second, that one can learn an indicative conditional without learning that the antecedent and consequent are both true; third, that belief revision is conservative in the sense that it does not reduce the probabilities to zero unnecessarily. The result gives us a clearer picture of the real costs of a truth-conditional context-sensitive Stalnaker's thesis-compliant semantics. (shrink)

The dominance conditional 'If I drink the contents of cup A, I will drink more than if drink the contents of cup B' is true if we know that the first cup contains more than the second. In the first part of the paper, I show that only one kind of theory of indicative conditionals can explain this fact — a Stalnaker-type semantics. In the second part of the paper, I show that dominance conditionals can help explain a long-standing mystery: (...) the question of how one-boxers and two-boxers are guided by conditionals to their respective answers to the Newcomb problem. I will suggest that both implicitly appeal to a decision theoretic principle I will call the Dominance Norm (DN), a principle that connects indicative dominance conditionals with rational courses of action. Finally, I show that DN in combination with a Stalnaker-type theory of indicatives commits us to the two-boxing answer in the Newcomb problem. (shrink)

I give a Dutch book argument for CDT thirders in the context of a generalized Sleeping Beauty scenario. In combination with the Briggs (2010) Dutch book for EDT thirders, this amounts to a purely decision-theoretic argument for halfing in Sleeping Beauty. In combination with the Hitchcock (2004) Dutch book for CDT halfers, this amounts to a Dutch book argument against CDT. The combined Dutch book against CDT invites a plausible diagnosis of the reasons for CDT’s failure: CDT is incompatible with (...) the Dutch book requirement because it allows the values of epistemically impossible outcomes influence one’s decision. (shrink)

In this paper I look at indicative nested whether-conditionals, sentences like:If I pass the exam, I will pass whether I pray or not.The behavior of ‘if’ in these examples is to be contrasted with the behavior of ‘if’ in or-to-if conditionals:If Mary is at home or at work, then if she is not at home, she is at work.I argue that no currently available semantics for indicative conditionals can explain both the behavior of ‘if’ in nested whether-conditionals and the behavior (...) of ‘if’ in or-to-ifs. We need a theory that predicts both. While no currently available theory makes the right predictions, one theory comes close—Heim’s rendition of Stalnaker’s semantics :183–221, 1992). I show how to fix Heim’s view to get the right results for all cases. In sum, the paper argues for a particular development of Stalnaker’s semantics, and shows that whether-conditionals cannot be dealt with on other approaches. (shrink)