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Conditionals and the Logic of Decision

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Richard Bradley
Richard Bradley*
Affiliation:
London School of Economics
*
†Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK.
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Abstract

In this paper Richard Jeffrey's ‘Logic of Decision’ is extended by examination of agents' attitudes to the sorts of possibilities identified by indicative conditional sentences. An expression for the desirability of conditionals is proposed and, along with Adams' thesis that the probability of a conditional equals the conditional probability of its antecedent given its consequent, is defended by informally deriving it from Jeffrey's notion of desirability and some weak constraints on rational preference for conditional possibilities. Finally a statement is given of a representation theorem establishing the conditions under which a rational agent's preferences for conditionals determines the existence of unique measures (up to choice of scale) of her degrees of belief and desire.

Type
A Symposium in Honor of Richard Jeffrey
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 67 , Issue S3: Supplement. Proceedings of the 1998 Biennial Meetings of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part II: Symposia Papers Sep., 2000 , 2000 , pp. S18 - S32
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

The ideas in this paper owe their existence not only to the inspiration of Richard Jeffrey's work, but also to his patient supervision of my own.

References

Adams, Ernest (1975). The Logic of Conditionals. Dordrecht: Reidel.10.1007/978-94-015-7622-2CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bolker, Ethan (1967). “A Simultaneous Axiomatisation of Utility and Subjective Probability.” Philosophy of Science 34: 333–340.10.1086/288171CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bradley, Richard (1998). “A Representation Theorem for a Decision Theory with Conditionals.” Synthese 116: 187–229.10.1023/A:1005030124500CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jeffrey, Richard (1983). The Logic of Decision. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Joyce, James (1998). “Why We Still Need a Logic of Decision”, Philosophy of Science, this volume.Google Scholar