What is Wrong with the Ramsey Test

Karolina Krzyżanowska (MCMP) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (13 May, 2015) titled "What is Wrong with the Ramsey Test". Abstract: According to an influential idea of Frank Ramsey, known as the Ramsey Test, evaluating an indicative conditional, “If A then C,” amounts to evaluating the conditional’s consequent, C, on the supposition of its antecedent, A. This idea inspired a popular view among contemporary philosophers and psychologists that the only thing we learn when someone asserts a conditional is that the speaker believes the conditional’s consequent to be highly probable on the supposition that its antecedent holds. Though prima facie intuitively appealing and to a great extent supported by empirical data, theories of conditionals based on the Ramsey Test alone fail to account for the connection between a conditional’s antecedent and its consequent, forcing us to yield acceptable and assertable conditionals as bizarre as “If Shakespeare did not write Anna Karenina, then raccoons are American mammals noted for their intelligence.” I will argue for a theory that takes the connection between conditionals' antecedents and their consequents seriously.