Conference Information

Conditionals and Conditionalization

Organizers: Richard Dietz and Igor Douven

While it strikes most as obvious that there exist close conceptual connections between conditionals and conditionalization, it is far less obvious what these connections precisely are. The aim of the workshop is to investigate these connections from an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on recent work in philosophy and experimental psychology. The time is ripe for such an approach, given that both linguists and psychologists working on conditionals are increasingly turning to the probabilistic theories of conditionals that philosophers have been developing over the past forty years or so. On the other hand, various philosophical claims have been made about conditionals – in particular concerning their semantics and pragmatics – apparently on no other basis than the linguistic intuitions of the philosophers making these claims. It would be interesting, and from a methodological perspective desirable, to subject these claims to more rigorous testing, which is where experimental psychologists could help (and, to some extent, have already helped).

Speakers include