Towards a Unified Account

In Chap. 2 , I recovered Ramsey’s account of conditionals. Now, there are two approaches: a probabilistic and an inferential one. The two accounts, the inferential and the probabilistic, seem, at first glance, incompatible. A unified treatment of all types of conditionals is desirable, and this is the aim of this chapter. Here, I will try to stick as much as possible to what I take Ramsey’s ideas to be. I will use Ramsey’s notion of variable hypotheticals, additional and contextual propositions as tools. In doing so, I will not treat conditional sentences as propositions; I will not attach truth values to them. Instead, I will speak of acceptability conditions for conditional sentences. Finally, the chapter informally outlines the requirements that a validity criterion for the present approach should, in principle, satisfy. The account is supposed to cover all types of conditionals, with no distinction concerning the mood of the verbs involved in the sentences.