Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
6858826 International Journal of Approximate Reasoning 2018 16 Pages PDF
Abstract
There is wide support in logic, philosophy, and psychology for the hypothesis that the probability of the indicative conditional of natural language, P(ifAthenB), is the conditional probability of B given A, P(B|A). We identify a conditional which is such that P(ifAthenB)=P(B|A) with de Finetti's conditional event, B|A. An objection to making this identification in the past was that it appeared unclear how to form compounds and iterations of conditional events. In this paper, we illustrate how to overcome this objection with a probabilistic analysis, based on coherence, of these compounds and iterations. We interpret the compounds and iterations as conditional random quantities which, given some logical dependencies, may reduce to conditional events. We show how the inference to B|A from A and B can be extended to compounds and iterations of both conditional events and biconditional events. Moreover, we determine the respective uncertainty propagation rules. Finally, we make some comments on extending our analysis to counterfactuals.
Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Computer Science Artificial Intelligence
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