Cognition 117 (2010) 302–318

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Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/COGNIT

The Adams family

Igor Douven a,⇑, Sara Verbrugge b
a
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
b
Department of Linguistics, University of Leuven, Belgium

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: According to Adams’s Thesis, the acceptability of an indicative conditional sentence goes by
Received 28 March 2009 the conditional probability of its consequent given its antecedent. We test, for the first
Revised 24 August 2010 time, whether this thesis is descriptively correct and show that it is not; in particular,
Accepted 26 August 2010
we show that it yields the wrong predictions for people’s judgments of the acceptability
of important subclasses of the class of inferential conditionals. Experimental results are
presented that reveal an interaction effect between, on the one hand, the type of inferential
Keywords:
connection between a conditional’s antecedent and its consequent and, on the other, the
Indicative conditionals
Adams’s Thesis
judged acceptability of the conditional in relation to the conditional probability of its con-
Acceptability sequent given its antecedent. Specifically, these results suggest a family of theses, each per-
Inferential conditionals taining to a different type of conditional, about how conditionals relate to the relevant
Conditional probability conditional probabilities.
! 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction tion in this respect in that it is generally (even if not univer-

There is little that one can say about the semantics and
pragmatics of indicative conditional sentences that is not
highly controversial.1 Even such fundamental questions as
whether conditionals have truth conditions, and, if they
do, which is the right account of these conditions, are still
wide open today, despite their having been hotly debated
for several decades. Adams’s Thesis stands out as an excep-
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: i.e.j.douven@rug.nl (I. Douven), sara.verbrugge@p-
sy.kuleuven.be (S. Verbrugge).
1
Conditionals are sentences of the forms ‘‘If p, [then] q” and ‘‘q if p,” with
p called the antecedent and q, the consequent. The most general classifica-
tion of such sentences distinguishes between indicative and subjunctive
conditionals. There is some debate about exactly what distinguishes these
classes from one another. Some say that they differ in that the antecedents
of subjunctive conditionals, but not those of indicative conditionals, are
known or at least supposed to be false. Bennet (2003: p. 10) proposes a
purely syntactic criterion, according to which the consequents of
subjunctive conditionals, but not those of indicative conditionals, have
‘‘would” as the auxiliary of their main verb. Both claims may well be too
strong; see DeRose (2010). However this may be, in the present paper we
shall only be concerned with clear cases of indicative conditionals. We use
‘‘conditional” (or ‘‘conditional sentence”) to refer to indicative conditionals
throughout.
sally) believed to be at least descriptively correct. To a first
approximation, the thesis asserts that the acceptability/
assertability of a conditional goes by the conditional proba-
bility of its consequent given its antecedent.
Those who believe Adams’s Thesis to be descriptively
correct cannot do so on the basis of any serious empirical
research, for, surprisingly perhaps, the thesis has never
been subjected to experimental testing. In the present pa-
per, we address this lack and show that the thesis yields
the wrong predictions of people’s judgments of the accept-
ability of important subclasses of the class of so-called
inferential conditionals. Experimental results, to be re-
ported below, reveal an interaction effect between, on
the one hand, the type of inferential connection between
a conditional’s antecedent and its consequent and, on the
other hand, the judged acceptability of the conditional in
relation to the conditional probability of its consequent gi-
ven its antecedent. Specifically, the results suggest a family
of theses, each pertaining to a different type of conditional,
about how conditionals relate to the relevant conditional
probabilities; some of these theses are closely related to
Adams’s original proposal, but others are at best remotely
related.

0010-0277/$ - see front matter ! 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2010.08.015
 I. Douven, S. Verbrugge / Cognition 117 (2010) 302–318
We start, in Section 2, by introducing the typology of
conditionals that will be deployed in our experiment. In
Section 3, we state Adams’s Thesis more carefully and pro-
vide some background to it by locating it within a broader
approach to conditionals; there we also distinguish be-
tween different versions of the thesis that may all have
their defenders. Section 4 describes some previous experi-
mental work that is related to our own experiments, which
are then presented in Sections 5–7. Finally, in Section 8, we
draw some general conclusions from our empirical results.
2. Classifying conditionals
It has become customary for linguists to group condi-
tionals into inferential and content conditionals.2 By the for-
mer, they mean conditionals expressing a reasoning process,
or an inference, having the conditional’s antecedent as a pre-
mise and its consequent as the conclusion. Examples are: ‘‘If
she looks tired, she has not had much sleep recently”; ‘‘If he
lives in Chelsea, he must be rich”; and ‘‘If the village is
flooded, the dam must have broken.” The class of content
conditionals seems to be less well delineated. Its members
are sometimes loosely defined as describing relations be-
tween states of affairs or events as they happen in reality,
but examples adduced in the literature suggest a rather
mixed bag, including such diverse conditionals as condi-
tional threats and promises as well as conditionals like ‘‘If
you run fast, you’ll be out of breath” and ‘‘If she works hard,
she will pass the exam.” Whether the distinction between
inferential and content conditionals is well founded, and in
particular whether at least some of the conditionals classi-
fied as content conditionals in the literature are not better
thought of as reflecting an inference from antecedent to con-
sequent, too, will not concern us here.3 What matters for our
purposes is that many conditionals encountered in collo-
quial speech fall into the class of inferential conditionals.
For many authors, the distinction between inferential
and content conditionals only serves as a starting point.
Various finer-grained typologies have been proposed,
especially of inferential conditionals. These typologies are
almost invariably based on grammatical distinctions. Here,
we want to introduce a different typology of inferential
conditionals, one that classifies them according to the type
of inference they embody.
Philosophers have traditionally distinguished between
certain and uncertain inferences. In certain inferences, the
truth of what is inferred is guaranteed by the truth of the
premises from which it is inferred. Not all inferences are
of this variety, as witness, for instance, the inference of
‘‘John is rich” from ‘‘John lives in Chelsea” and ‘‘Most peo-
ple living in Chelsea are rich.” The truth of the first sen-
tence is clearly not guaranteed, but only made likely, by
2
See, among others, Dancygier (1998, 2003), Dancygier and Sweetser
(2005), Declerck and Reed (2001), and Haegeman (2003). For relevant
experimental results, see Verbrugge, Dieussaert, Schaeken, Smessaert, and
Van Belle (2007).
3
It is worth mentioning that, on our understanding, every conditional
that may plausibly be thought of as reflecting a reasoning process will
qualify as an inferential conditional. Thus understood, the class of
inferential conditionals may well include conditionals that some linguists
would rather classify as content conditionals.
303
the joint truth of the second and third. Because the first
deductive systems (logics) were aimed at formalizing the
notion of certain inference, certain inferences are also
called ‘‘deductive inferences”.4
Since Peirce, the 19th-century pragmatist philosopher,
it is standard practice to group uncertain inferences into
inductive and abductive ones. Though this is presumably
not exactly how Peirce understood the notion, modern
authors typically mean by an abductive inference one in
which the conclusion follows on the basis of explanatory
considerations, more particularly, because it is thought to
be the best explanation of something thought to be known.
An instance would be inferring that Kate has not had much
sleep lately from the known premise that she looks tired,
as the former would provide the best explanation of the
latter.5
Inductive inferences form a more heterogeneous class.
In this paper, by an inductive inference we shall mean
one in which the conclusion follows with a certain statisti-
cal probability from the premises, but various other types
of inductive inference have been described in the litera-
ture.6 An example of what we mean by inductive inference
is the inference of ‘‘Louise speaks at least two languages”
from the premises ‘‘97 per cent of the Belgian college stu-
dents speak at least two languages” (or ‘‘Most Belgian col-
lege students speak at least two languages”) and ‘‘Louise is
a Belgian college student.”
Corresponding to this typology, we shall say that q is a
deductive/inductive/abductive consequence of p iff q can
be inferred deductively/inductively/abductively from p.
For later purposes, we notice that, whereas for deduc-
tive inferences the conditional probability of the
conclusion given the conjunction of the premises will
be high – even 1 – for inductive and abductive infer-
ences this need not be the case. For inductive inferences,
this will be clear. For instance, one may infer ‘‘John is
rich” from ‘‘John lives in Chelsea” and ‘‘60 per cent of
the people living in Chelsea are rich,” but the probability
of the first sentence conditional on the conjunction of
the second and third is only .6. (This may be precisely
the probability one ought attach to the conclusion of
the inference, but we leave these normative issues to
one side here; see, for instance, Kyburg (1990) for a use-
ful discussion.) As to abductive inferences, suppose you
know that Tom and Hank have recently had a flaming
row that ended their friendship. Now someone tells
you she thinks that she just saw Tom and Hank jogging
together. It seems to you that the best explanation for
4
Mostly this name is used for inferences in which the truth of the
conclusion is guaranteed by the truth of the premises purely on the basis of
logical form. This guarantee can also come from meaning, however, as in
the inference of ‘‘a is not green all over” from ‘‘a is red all over.” We mean
deductive inference to be understood so as to include the latter type of
inference as well.
5
See Fann (1970) and Hookway (1985, chap. 7) for some thorough
discussions of Peirce’s notion of abduction. The notion of abduction as it is
currently for the most part understood originates in Harman (1965). See
Douven (2010a) for a survey of the literature on abduction.
6
For an excellent overview of the distinct kinds of inductive inference,
the reader is referred to Kyburg (1990, chap. 4). It should also be mentioned
that some authors interpret inductive inference so widely that it even
encompasses abductive inference; see, e.g., Harman (1999: p. 29).
304 I. Douven, S. Verbrugge / Cognition 117 (2010) 302–318
this is that they are friends again. This does not neces-
sarily mean that you think it likely that they are friends
again conditional on the assumption that they are jog-
ging together. What will be the case – we may suppose
– is that you find this explanation more likely than any
of the alternative possible explanations for their jogging
again.7
Our proposal now is to group inferential conditionals
according to the type of inference that they reflect – deduc-
tive, inductive, or abductive. So, p ? q is a deductive infer-
ential (or DI, for short)/inductive inferential (II)/abductive
inferential (AI) conditional iff q is a deductive/inductive/
abductive consequence of p. (Throughout the paper, we
shall use ‘‘p ? q” to stand for the conditional with anteced-
ent p and consequent q.)
The three types of conditional have corresponding ‘‘con-
textual” versions:
A sentence p ? q is a contextual DI/II/AI conditional iff q
is a deductive/inductive/abductive consequence of
{p, p1, . . ., pn}, with p1, . . ., pn being background premises
salient in the context in which p ? q is asserted or
being evaluated.
For instance,
(1) If Chelsea wins the Champions League in 2011, then
that will be a first in the club’s history
is not a DI conditional in the strict sense: the consequent
does not follow deductively from ‘‘Chelsea wins the Cham-
pions League in 2011.” But it does follow deductively from
that sentence together with the (true) premise that so far
Chelsea has never been able to win the Champions League;
that makes (1) a contextual DI conditional, supposing that
the said premise is salient in the context in which the sen-
tence is uttered or evaluated. Likewise,
(2) If John is a second-year psychology student, he has
passed his statistics exam
is not an II conditional taken by itself, but it is in a context
where, for instance, ‘‘Hardly any of the second-year psy-
chology students failed their statistics exam” is a salient
background premise. In practice, we may more often
encounter contextual inferential conditionals than non-
contextual ones. This seems particularly true for II and AI
conditionals.8
As to contextual AI conditionals, it should be noted that the
consequent need not refer to the best explanation of the
antecedent. It may, and presumably often will, do so, as in
7
There is an ongoing debate in the philosophy of science about the
relation between abductive and probabilistic reasoning; see, among many
others, van Fraassen (1989, chap. 7), Douven (1999, 2010a, Section 4),
Lipton (2004, chap. 7), Tregear (2004), and Weisberg (2009).
8
However, it would be wrong to think that noncontextual II and AI
conditionals are impossible. For instance, ‘‘If most psychology students had
at least a B for the statistics exam and John is a psychology student, then
John had at least a B for the statistics exam” could be an example of a
noncontextual II conditional – ‘‘could be,” because this sentence might be
asserted in a context in which certain background premises are salient
which are relevant to the interpretation of the sentence and which might,
for instance, make it a DI conditional (like the premise that John is so smart
that his grades always place him in the top 10% of his peer group).
(3) If Tom and Hank are jogging together, then they are
friends again,
when the background knowledge about Tom and Hank gi-
ven a few paragraphs back is assumed. But in Bennet’s
(2003: p. 340) example
(4) If the umbrella is not in the closet, my memory is
failing,
where the speaker has an apparent memory of putting his
umbrella in the closet and no memory of removing it, the
best explanation for the apparent memory, at least if the
umbrella is not in the closet (as the antecedent says), is
that the speaker’s memory is failing. In other words, here
the consequent is not the best explanation of the anteced-
ent, but rather of a background premise – though the con-
sequent is only the best explanation of that premise if the
umbrella is not in the closet.
We have not been aiming for completeness here, and
want to leave open the possibility that there exist condition-
als that are plausibly regarded as expressing reasoning pro-
cesses but that do not fall into any of our categories. In
effect, this is already so because, as intimated, we are not
considering all forms of inductive inference that have been
distinguished in the literature. This being said, however, we
do believe that the aforementioned categories capture large
classes of inferential conditionals, and important ones at that
(as we aim to demonstrate experimentally). Furthermore, it
may well be possible to refine the typology. For instance, a
natural refinement of the class of AI conditionals would con-
sider the type of explanation involved. Often explaining is a
matter of highlighting causal structure, but philosophers of
science have argued that this is not always so.9
3. Epistemic theories of conditionals and Adams’s Thesis
Epistemic theories of conditionals constitute a pres-
ently popular approach to theorizing about conditionals.
The characteristic commonality of these theories is that
they make the acceptability/assertability of a conditional
dependent on the holding (or otherwise) of an epistemi-
cally significant relationship between the conditional’s
antecedent and its consequent.10 This relationship is typi-
cally one to the effect that a change in a person’s epistemic
position vis-à-vis a conditional’s antecedent puts her, or
9
See, e.g., Kitcher (1981) and De Regt and Dieks (2005). To forestall
misunderstanding, it must be noted that what Over, Hadjichristidis, Evans,
Handley, and Sloman (2007) call ‘‘causal conditionals” are not necessarily
AI conditionals in which the explanatory connection between antecedent
and consequent is at bottom a causal connection. Such conditionals need
not be AI conditionals at all. For instance, their example ‘‘If the cost of petrol
increases, then traffic congestion will improve” (p. 63), which they regard
as a causal conditional because there is evidence for the existence of a
causal relation between its antecedent and consequent, is presumably not
an AI conditional – only given some rather unnatural assumptions about
the context could an improvement of traffic congestion best explain an
increase of the cost of petrol – and is more plausibly read as being either a
DI or an II conditional, depending on the exact details of the context.
10
In the present context, ‘‘acceptability” is typically understood as
meaning justified (rational, reasonable) believability. There is currently
no unanimity about how it relates to assertability; see Williamson (1996,
2000) and Douven (2006, 2009) for different views on this matter.
 I. Douven, S. Verbrugge / Cognition 117 (2010) 302–318
would put her, in a certain epistemic position vis-à-vis that
conditional’s consequent, all else remaining equal.11,12 An
example of such a theory would be one according to which
p ? q is acceptable to/assertable for a person iff the person’s
coming to know p would place her in the position to know q
(if she is not already in that position); or it could be held that
p ? q is acceptable/assertable iff, or to the extent that, what
would justify the person in believing p would also justify her
in believing q; or that it is acceptable/assertable iff the per-
son’s subjective probability for q conditional on p, but not
the unconditional probability of q, exceeds a given threshold
value. Many other epistemic connections could be, and have
been, considered; see, among others, Adams (1975), Lewis
(1976), Jackson (1979, 1987), Mellor (1993), Edgington
(1995), Bennett (2003), Rescher (2007), and Douven
(2008a). In the following, we focus on Adams’s theory, which
is among the most popular epistemic theories.
Stalnaker (1970) famously proposed that we identify
the probability of a conditional with the probability of
the consequent, conditional on the antecedent, that is,
Prðp ! qÞ ¼ PrðqjpÞ; ðEqÞ
with the proviso that Pr(p) > 0.13 This proposal is often re-
ferred to as ‘‘the Equation”.14 Just as famously, the proposal
was shown to be untenable by a number of ‘‘triviality re-
sults” due to Lewis (1976, 1986), Hájek (1989, 1994), Döring
(1994), Hall (1994), and others. For instance, one of Lewis’s
results shows that if (Eq) held, then it would also have to
hold that the conditional probability of q given p equals
the probability of q for all p and q. Surely this is absurd; it
is rather unlikely that Chelsea will do badly in next year’s
Premier League, but it is not quite so unlikely that they will
do badly if they lose their six top players.
Adams’s proposal – now commonly called ‘‘Adams’s The-
sis” – looks, in his own presentations of it, very similar to
(Eq), the only obvious difference being that the former is re-
stricted to ‘‘simple” conditionals, that is, unembedded con-
ditionals whose antecedent and consequent do not embed
conditionals. The restriction is necessitated by the fact that,
for Adams, conditionals do not express propositions (they do
not possess classical truth conditions), which has as a conse-
quence that, unlike (Eq), Adams’s Thesis does not succumb
to the said triviality results.15 A less obvious difference be-
11
Cf. Gärdenfors (1988: p. 147): ‘‘[C]onditional sentences in various forms
are about changes of states of belief.”
12
The ceteris paribus clause is meant to take care of such conditionals as
‘‘If Reagan worked for the KGB, no one will ever find out.” Here, an
epistemic change vis-à-vis the antecedent might lead one to give up the
conditional rather than to change one’s epistemic attitude vis-à-vis the
consequent; see van Fraassen (1980).
13
The proviso is unimportant, as conditionals are ‘‘zero-intolerant,”
meaning that ‘‘nobody has any use for p ? q when for him Pr(p) = 0”
(Bennet (2003: p. 55); notation altered for uniformity of reading).
14
Other names for it that one encounters in the literature are ‘‘Stalnaker’s
Thesis” (e.g., van Fraassen, 1976) and ‘‘Conditional Construal of Conditional
Probability” (e.g., Hájek & Hall, 1994).
15
To escape Lewis’s triviality results, the restriction of (Eq) to simple
conditionals – leaving open the possibility that they express propositions –
would be enough. However, Hájek (1989)’s triviality result does not assume
embeddability of conditionals (it does assume that conditionals express
propositions). McGee (1989) is an attempt to extend Adams’s Thesis to
compounds of conditionals. Lance (1991) argues that the attempt fails; this
also follows from results presented in Dietz and Douven (2010).
305
tween the two proposals, also related to Adams’s non-propo-
sitional view on conditionals, is that, while in Adams’s Thesis
Pr(qjp) is to stand for a person’s subjective conditional proba-
bility for q given p, Pr(p ? q) is not to be interpreted as the
probability that the conditional is true, but rather as the de-
gree of assertability or acceptability of the conditional.16 For
this reason, Jackson (1987: p. 11) states Adams’s Thesis as As(-
p ? q) = Pr(qjp). Because in our experiments we focus on
acceptability, we prefer to state it as
Acðp ! qÞ ¼ PrðqjpÞ; ðATÞ
with p ? q being a simple conditional and with again the
proviso that Pr(p) > 0.
We have five comments on this proposal. First, Adams
officially relates only assertability to conditional probabil-
ity, and not acceptability; see in particular his (1965).
However, a reference to personal communication in Hájek
and Hall (1994: p. 77) makes it clear that Adams does
(also) conceive of Pr(qjp) as measuring the acceptability
of p ? q. This, at any rate, is how Adams is nowadays com-
monly interpreted.17,18
Second, we can speak about acceptability as well as
about assertability both in a categorical or qualitative
way and in a graded or quantitative way. It makes good
sense to say that a sentence is acceptable/assertable, but
it makes equally good sense to say that a sentence is highly
(or moderately, or hardly) acceptable/assertable, or that it
is acceptable/assertable to a certain degree, as well as that
one sentence is more acceptable/assertable than a second.
Clearly, (AT) has its natural home in the graded accounts of
acceptance and assertion. Indeed, as Lewis (1976: p. 133 f)
points out, insofar as it pertains to assertion, (AT) is a nat-
ural extension to conditionals (which, as intimated, do not
express propositions according to Adams) of the idea that
the assertability of a proposition equals its probability. It
merits remark that, by itself, a graded view of assertion is
not in conflict with the currently popular knowledge ac-
count of assertion, according to which a sentence is asser-
table only if one knows it (Williamson, 1996, 2000). If
16
It is to be noted that degrees of assertability or acceptability are not to
be conceived of as providing a different interpretation of the probability
operator. They simply do not obey the probability calculus; see, e.g., McGee
(1987: p. 485) and Hájek and Hall (1994: p. 77).
17
See, e.g., McGee (1987: p. 485): ‘‘The numerical values [Adams assigns
to conditionals] accurately measure the assertability and acceptability of
conditionals . . .” See also Mellor (1993: p. 233): ‘‘The Adams’s Thesis . . . is
that my degree of acceptance of a conditional ‘If P, Q’ is equal to my
conditional credence in Q given P,” where by ‘‘conditional credence” Mellor
means conditional subjective probability; Arló-Costa (2001, Section 3), who
likewise states Adams’s Thesis directly in terms of acceptance; and the
quote from Bennett (2003) in the text below.
18
A reviewer remarked that it is odd to suppose that conditionals can be
acceptable in the sense of being justifiedly credible if they do not have truth
conditions, given that to believe is to believe to be true. This is in fact one of
the two main objections that have been levelled against Adams’s view, the
other being Lewis’s (1976: p. 141f) objection that, on Adams’s view, it is
hard to make sense of Boolean combinations of conditionals and other
sentences (conditional or non-conditional); see Douven (in press, Sec-
tion 1.2) for more on these objections. Adams (1998, chap. 8), and
Edgington (2005) contain responses to the former objection. For present
purposes, it is immaterial whether or not these responses are fully
satisfactory; our aim, after all, is not to defend Adams. To the contrary,
the results to be presented show that his proposal is, at least in its original
formulation, descriptively inadequate.
306 I. Douven, S. Verbrugge / Cognition 117 (2010) 302–318
categorical assertability is identified with assertability to
the highest degree, and a sentence is held to be assertable
to the highest degree iff it has probability 1, then the
knowledge account of assertion is even a limiting case of
the graded account of assertion if it is also held – as for in-
stance Williamson does – that one should assign probabil-
ity 1 to a sentence iff one knows the sentence. The same
goes, mutatis mutandis, for a graded account of
acceptability.
Third, (AT) is supposed to hold generally, not unexcep-
tionally. Adherents of the thesis will readily admit that a
conditional whose corresponding conditional probability
is high may, for Gricean or more broadly social reasons,
still have a low degree of assertability. However, these rea-
sons only pertain to assertability, not to acceptability. (Be-
lief is, for instance, not subject to social norms of
politeness.) They may thus be ignored for the purposes of
our studies, which focused on the acceptability, and not
the assertability, of conditionals.
Fourth, what is the status of (AT)? Is it meant as a nor-
mative thesis, or is it supposed to be descriptively correct,
or both? Adams and others have pointed to various advan-
tages for philosophical theorizing that adopting (AT) would
have.19 Clearly, however, that is not enough to make the
thesis normatively compelling, and we are unaware of any
explicit claims that the thesis is thus compelling. By con-
trast, as already noted at the outset, several authors have
explicitly claimed that (AT) is descriptively correct (or at
least that some thesis in its vicinity is correct; see below).
For instance, according to McGee (1989: p. 485) ‘‘[Adams’s]
theory describes what English speakers assert and accept
with unfailing accuracy . . .”20 Equally, Jackson (1987: p.
17) states that ‘‘Adams’s Thesis is massively supported by
the empirical evidence relating to our actual use of indica-
tive conditionals”.21 In fact, as Evans, Handley, and Over
(2003: p. 323) also observe, Ramsey (1931: p. 247n), in the
footnote which is generally taken to have inspired (AT),
was clearly trying to give a phenomenologically plausible
account of the kind of process people go through to deter-
mine the probability of a conditional (as well as the corre-
sponding conditional probability). So a descriptive reading
of (AT) is, in any case, appropriate (next to a normative
one, perhaps). Note, however, that experimental findings,
whether confirming or disconfirming (AT), are relevant
either way. Even if (AT) were only, or primarily, meant to
be normatively compelling, it would still be valuable to
know whether and, if so, to what extent ordinary people
comply with it, just as psychologists have found it valuable
to investigate whether people comply with the laws of logic
or probability theory.
19
See, e.g., Adams (1965, 1975, 1998) and Hájek and Hall (1994).
20
See also the citation from the same paper in note 17.
21
See also Jackson (19787: p. 12): ‘‘There is a great deal of evidence for
[(AT)]. There is head-counting evidence. Very many philosophers of
otherwise differing opinions have found [(AT)] highly intuitive. There is
case-by-case evidence. Take a conditional which is highly assertible . . . ; it
will invariably be one whose consequent is highly probable given its
antecedent.” Edgington, who shares Adams’s view on conditionals, is, as a
noteworthy exception, much more cautious on this point. She says: ‘‘It is an
empirical question how well [(AT)] fits our practice of assessing condition-
als . . .” (1995: p. 280).
Lastly, we note that, as it stands, (AT) is very strict in
that it requires the acceptability or assertability of a condi-
tional to equal the corresponding conditional probability.
But clearly, one can acknowledge that acceptability/asser-
tability is a matter of degree, and also subscribe to the
thought that, at least in general, the acceptability/asserta-
bility of a conditional ‘‘goes by” its conditional probability
(as Lewis (1976: p. 133) puts it), without having to sub-
scribe to a strict equality between Ac(p ? q) and Pr(qj p),
as (AT) postulates, or even to this slightly weaker version
of the thesis:22
Acðp ! qÞ # PrðqjpÞ: ðWAT1Þ
What are apparently meant as paraphrases of (AT) in
the literature suggest that various authors also conceive
of the relevant connection in a looser way. Purportedly
stating Adams’s view – with which he proclaims to agree
– Bennet (2003: p. 46) writes: ‘‘[T]he assertability or
acceptability of p ? q for a person at a time is governed
by the probability the person then assigns to q on the sup-
position of p” (notation altered for uniformity of reading;
italics ours). This can be interpreted in a number of ways.
For instance, Bennett might have in mind something like
Acðp ! qÞ is high=middling=low iff PrðqjpÞ is high=middling=low:
ðWAT2Þ
This, in any event, is the version of Adams’s Thesis that
McGee (1989: p. 487 f) aims to defend; he thinks that, thus
interpreted, Adams’s Thesis ‘‘displays uncanny accuracy”
(p. 488).23 Alternatively, Bennett’s assertion that Ac(p ? q)
is governed by Pr(qjp) could be taken to mean that
Acðp ! qÞ highly correlates with PrðqjpÞ; ðWAT3Þ
or perhaps even just that
Acðp ! qÞ at least moderately correlates with PrðqjpÞ:
ðWAT4Þ
(Presumably on no plausible reading of ‘‘being governed
by” could Ac(p ? q) be said to be governed by Pr(qjp) if
there is but a weak correlation between them.)
We thus seem to have a family of Adams’s Theses. Nat-
urally, if (AT) holds, then so do (WAT1)–(WAT4). But any of
these latter theses might hold without (AT) holding. There
is also the possibility that different theses hold for different
restricted domains. For instance, one thesis might hold for
DI conditionals, a second for II conditionals, and a third for
AI conditionals. A key objective of our experiments was to
investigate whether this possibility obtains. Before going
into the experiments, we briefly discuss some recent re-
lated work.
22
We take it to be understood that in (WAT1), and also in the further
variants of (AT) to be stated below in the text, p ? q stands for a simple
conditional.
23
Hájek and Hall (1994: p. 101) think that, while (WAT2) may be
plausible, it is not very interesting, given that ‘‘it seems unlikely that it
could play a very useful role in the development of probability logic, or in
other philosophical projects.” Clearlly, insofar as one’s interest is in the
descriptive adequacy of (AT) or any of its variants, such considerations are
beside the point.
 I. Douven, S. Verbrugge / Cognition 117 (2010) 302–318
4. Related experimental work
Contrary to what Bradley’s and McGee’s earlier-cited
claims would seem to suggest, neither (AT) nor any of the
mentioned variants have yet been investigated experimen-
tally. Still, in the past decade Jonathan Evans and David Over,
together with various collaborators, have been doing
impressive experimental work on the related (Eq); see for
instance, Hadjichristidis et al. (2001), Evans, Handley, and
Over (2003), Over and Evans (2003), Evans and Over
(2004), Evans, Handley, Neilens, and Over (2007), Over
et al. (2007), Over and Evans (2010), Politzer, Over, and Bar-
atgin (in press).24 In all their studies, they found a high corre-
lation between the probabilities that participants assigned to
a set of conditionals and the corresponding conditional prob-
abilities, thereby providing strong support for (Eq).25
In none of the aforementioned studies were the partic-
ipants asked to grade the acceptability of the conditionals;
the question each time was how probable it is that the con-
ditional is true. Of course, this might ipso facto have elic-
ited the participants’ acceptability judgments, in which
case the said studies would have provided empirical sup-
port for (AT) as well. However, the past three decades have
witnessed a surge of interest in the relation between
acceptability and subjective probability, and philosophers
have offered various reasons for doubting that they are
as closely related as was once assumed. The best known
reason derives from the so-called Lottery Paradox (Kyburg,
1961). Suppose you own a ticket – say, ticket # 14 – in
what you know to be a fair lottery consisting of
1,000,000 tickets, only one of which is going to win. Then
while, prior to the drawing, ‘‘Ticket # 14 won’t win” is
highly probable, it cannot be highly acceptable. For if it
were, then presumably each element of the set {‘‘Ticket #
i won’t win”j i=1, . . . ,1,000,000} would be highly accept-
able, these sentences being equiprobable. Patently, though,
if you were to actually accept all of them, your resulting
belief state would be inconsistent, given that you know
that the lottery has a winner. Hence, acceptability does
not go by probability – or so a majority of philosophers
who have considered the issue hold.26 Admittedly, the Lot-
tery Paradox involves a rather peculiar type of sentences.
Still, the foregoing argument does give grounds to not sim-
ply assuming the truth of (AT) on the basis of Evans and
Over’s work on (Eq) and to test (AT) on its own, by asking
participants to grade the acceptability of conditionals, rather
24
For related work by other researchers, see Oaksford and Chater (2003),
Oberauer and Wilhelm (2003), Weidenfeld, Oberauer, and Horning (2005),
Oberauer, Weidenfeld, and Fischer (2007), and Pfeifer and Kleiter (2010).
25
In view of the triviality arguments mentioned earlier, Evans and Over’s
results may appear puzzling. After all, the triviality arguments show
precisely that (Eq) cannot hold if Pr(p ? q) is interpreted as the probability
that p ? q is true. It would thus seem that even if the participants’
subjective probabilities appear to obey (Eq), they cannot really do so. For
responses to this puzzle, arguing (though along different lines) that there is
no real tension between the triviality arguments and the said experimental
results, see Edgington (2003) and Evans and Over (2004: p. 28 ff); but see
also Dietz and Douven (in press).
26
See, e.g., Lehrer (1974, 1986, 1990), Kaplan (1981a, 1981b, 1996),
Pollock (1987, 1990), Ryan (1996), Evnine (1999), Nelkin (2000), Adler
(2002), Douven and Williamson (2006), and Douven (2008b).
307
than their probability of truth. That is what we set out to do
in our own experiments.
The different focus of our work raises a noteworthy
methodological issue. The notion of acceptability as it fig-
ures in Adams’s work is clearly meant as an epistemic no-
tion: a statement is acceptable in Adams’s sense if and to
the extent that it is reasonable to believe. However, it can-
not be ruled out that, when asked to grade the acceptabil-
ity of a statement, one might take the question to pertain
to the social acceptability of the statement. For instance,
a statement, even if deemed acceptable epistemically
speaking, might be socially unacceptable in that it would
be an impolite or irrelevant or otherwise inappropriate
thing to say in a conversation. Our second experiment
had the specific purpose of verifying that the participants
had understood the question about the acceptability of
conditionals in the intended – epistemic – sense.
As mentioned, considerations deriving from the Lottery
Paradox do not conclusively exclude that acceptability goes
by probability. It might thus be that, as a matter of fact, par-
ticipants’ judgments of the acceptability of a given condi-
tional coincide with their judgments of the probability of
truth of that conditional. To see whether this is the case,
we conducted a third experiment in which we asked partic-
ipants to grade conditionals according to their probability of
truth and compared the results with those of our main
experiment, which pertained to acceptability. The differ-
ences in the outcomes lend further support to the thesis that
acceptability is not (fully) determined by probability.
There are two further ways that deserve mentioning in
which our experiments differed from those of Evans, Over,
and their collaborators. First, the latter almost invariably
presented contexts in which probabilities were specified
for all logical possibilities; participants were then asked
to judge the probabilities of conditionals relevantly related
to these contexts and were also asked to judge the corre-
sponding conditional probabilities. However, the mental
arithmetic these participants had thereby to complete
was later feared to have created artifacts in the data; see
Evans and Over (2004: p. 140). To prevent this kind of
problem, we used context descriptions that did not involve
any numerical information but instead used what logicians
call ‘‘generalized quantifiers” – terms such as ‘‘all,” ‘‘most,”
‘‘almost all,” ‘‘practically never,” and so on – to provide sta-
tistical information whenever that was required by the
purpose of the studies. Second, we tested Adams’s theory
of conditionals specifically in connection with the typology
of inferential conditionals introduced earlier. Therefore,
our test items were selected so as to make our tests consist
of equal numbers of DI, II, and AI conditionals.
5. Experiment 1
One objective of our first experiment was to investigate
the relationship between the acceptability of inferential
conditionals and the corresponding conditional probabili-
ties. In particular, we were interested in whether Adams’s
proposal is descriptively correct, as several philosophers
have claimed. Another objective was to investigate whether
there are significant differences between acceptability and
probability ratings for the three types of conditionals.
308 I. Douven, S. Verbrugge / Cognition 117 (2010) 302–318
Adams’s own theory predicts that this will not be so. After
all, his theory makes no reference to the types of inference
that may be involved in the reasoning process expressed
by a conditional. Thus, Adams and his followers must be tac-
itly assuming, or in any event are committed to the view,
that either our typology is irrelevant to matters having to
do with the acceptability/assertability of conditionals or
any influence the type which an inferential conditional be-
longs to may have on its acceptability/assertability is al-
ready accounted for by whatever factors go into the
determination of the corresponding conditional probability.
Either assumption would be proven wrong if we found sig-
nificant differences between, say, how acceptability ratings
of DI conditionals relate to probability ratings of such condi-
tionals and, on the other hand, how these different ratings
relate to one another in the case of AI or II conditionals.
5.1. Method
5.1.1. Participants
Sixty-seven students of the University of Leuven partic-
ipated in the experiment as part of a course requirement.
5.1.2. Design
The question concerning probability and the question
concerning acceptability were manipulated between sub-
jects. The type of inferential conditional was manipulated
within subjects.
5.1.3. Materials and procedure
All materials were in Dutch, the participants’ mother
tongue. Thirty items consisting of context–sentence pairs
were presented in a booklet. Ten of the sentences were
DI conditionals, ten were AI conditionals, and ten were II
conditionals. Each participant had to evaluate all items.
Items were randomized per booklet and the booklets were
randomly distributed in the lecture hall.
The participants were divided into two groups. We
asked one group to judge the acceptability of conditionals
and another to judge the corresponding conditional proba-
bilities. To be more precise, one group (N = 30) was given
30 questions of the following form (i 2 {1, . . . , 30}):
Context Ci
pi ? qi
How acceptable is this statement in context Ci?
Highly unacceptable 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Highly acceptable27
The other group (N = 37) got 30 matching questions,
which had this form:
Context C !i (=Context Ci + ‘‘Suppose pi”)
qi
How likely is this statement in context C !i ?
27
The numbers 2–6 were also labelled, in the obvious way (2 = unac-
ceptable, 3 = somewhat unacceptable, and so on).
Very unlikely 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Very likely
The following are instances of the first schema, of one of our
DI items, one of our II items, and one of our AI items, respec-
tively; the corresponding examples of the questions asking for
the conditional probability can be read from the second schema
above. (For the full materials, see Appendix A.)
(DI) Context: All students in class 6C have at least a B for
their math test paper.
Conditional: If Ben is in class 6C, then he has at least
a B for his math test paper.
Indicate how acceptable you find this conditional in
the given context:
Highly unacceptable 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Highly acceptable
(II) Context: According to a recent report written on the
authority of the Dutch government, many primary
school students in the province of Friesland (where
many people still mainly speak Frisian) have difficulty
with spelling. Jitske is a student of a primary school
somewhere in the Netherlands.
Conditional: If Jitske goes to a Frisian primary
school, then she has difficulty with spelling.
Etc.
(AI) Context: You strongly doubt that Hank will have
passed the first-year examination. You suspect that
his parents will buy him a car only if he passed that
examination. You suddenly see Hank driving a new car.
Conditional: If the car Hank is driving is his, then he
passed the first-year examination.
Etc.
In determining conditional probabilities in the above
way, we followed Hadjichristidis et al. (2001). Another
method, suggested by the ratio definition of conditional
probability, would be to determine Pr(qj p) by determining
Pr(p ^ q) and Pr(p) and dividing the former by the latter (cf.
Over et al. (2007: p. 67)). For reasons given in Edgington
(1995: p. 266 f) and (1997: p. 108 f), it would be wrong
to think that the latter way of determining conditional
probabilities is mandatory, or in any case, to be preferred
to the former. In fact, the former way is clearly much closer
to Ramsey’s proposal for determining conditional probabil-
ities, hinted at earlier, according to which we determine
Pr(qjp) by adding, hypothetically, p to our current stock
of beliefs and determining how probable we deem q in that
hypothetical situation. (This proposal now commonly goes
by the name ‘‘the Ramsey test.”)28 Moreover, evidence pre-
sented in Zhao, Shah, and Osherson (2009) suggests that
Ramsey’s proposal offers the more accurate way of deter-
mining conditional probabilities.29
28
Bennett (2005: p. 53) even goes so far as to say that ‘‘[t]he best
definition [of conditional probability] we have is the one provided by the
Ramsey test” and not by the ratio definition. Oaksford and Chater (2007: p.
109) agree. On this issue see also Hájek (2003).
29
While Zhao, Shah, and Osherson (2009) do not refer to Ramsey’s work,
their ‘‘direct” conditional probabilities judgments are in effect judgments of
conditional probabilities determined via Ramsey’s proposal.
 I. Douven, S. Verbrugge / Cognition 117 (2010) 302–318
5.2. Results
Firstly, we investigated Adams’s Thesis in its strictest
form (AT) and its approximate form (WAT1). To that end,
we conducted an ANOVA analysis with acceptability/prob-
ability as between subjects variable and type of conditional
as within subjects variable. The analysis of question type
revealed a main effect of acceptability/probability
(F(1, 65) = 34.51; p < .00001; mean probability = 5.44;
mean acceptability = 4.76) and a main effect of type of con-
ditional (F(2, 130) = 350.13; p < .00001; mean deductive =
6.08; mean inductive = 4.6; mean abductive = 4.63) and
an interaction effect between both (F(2, 130) = 28.36;
p < .00001). For all these tests, power > 0.99.30 The main ef-
fect between acceptability and probability disproves (AT)
and (WAT1).
As for the effect of type of conditional, planned compar-
isons revealed that the abductive sentences did not differ
from the inductive sentences.31 The abductive sentences
differed significantly from the deductive sentences
(F(1, 65) = 449.89; p < .01). Inductive and deductive sen-
tences also differed significantly (F(1, 65) = 474.6; p < .01).
As for the interaction effect between type of conditional
and acceptability/probability, planned comparisons re-
vealed that acceptability and probability differed signifi-
cantly for the abductive sentences (F(1, 65) = 18.18;
p < .0001; mean acceptability = 4.34; mean probabil-
ity = 4.92). Acceptability and probability differed signifi-
cantly for the inductive sentences (F(1, 65) = 72.55;
p < .0001; mean acceptability = 3.99; mean probabil-
ity = 5.19). No significant difference was revealed between
acceptability (mean = 5.96) and probability (mean = 6.20)
for the deductive sentences.
Secondly, we tested whether (WAT2) holds. To that end,
we recoded the scale into three levels, 1–2 complying with
low probability/acceptability, 3–4–5 with medium proba-
bility/acceptability, 6–7 with high probability/acceptabil-
ity. Low was given score 1, medium 2, and high 3. We
then conducted an ANOVA analysis with acceptability/
probability as between subjects variable and type of condi-
tional as within subjects variable. The analysis revealed a
main effect of acceptability/probability (F(1, 65) = 27.03;
p < .00001) and a main effect of type of conditional
(F(2, 130) = 270.99; p < .00001) and an interaction effect
between both (F(2, 130) = 23.18; p < .00001). For all these
tests, power >0.99. The main effect between acceptability
and probability disproves (WAT2).
As for the effect of type of conditional, planned compar-
isons revealed that the abductive sentences did not differ
from the inductive sentences.32 The abductive sentences
differed significantly from deductive sentences
(F(1, 65) = 370.73; p < .01). Inductive and deductive sen-
tences also differed significantly (F(1, 65) = 371.78; p < .01).
30
Determined according to BWPower, Version 1.6, September 2002
(1997–2002 Roger Bakeman). See also Bakeman and McArthur (1999).
31
However, when we look at probability and acceptability separately,
abductive and inductive sentences differ. Acceptability: F(1, 65) = 17.28;
p < .0001. Probability: F(1, 65) = 13.58; p < .001.
32
Here, too, abductive and inductive sentences differ when we look at
probability and acceptability separately. Acceptability: F(1, 65) = 16.15;
p < .001. Probability: F(1, 65) = 10.10; p < .01.
309
As for the interaction effect between type of conditional
and acceptability/probability, planned comparisons re-
vealed that acceptability and probability differed signifi-
cantly for the abductive sentences (F(1, 65) = 10.32; p
< .01). Acceptability and probability differed significantly
for the inductive sentences (F(1, 65) = 52.33; p < .0001). No
significant difference was revealed between acceptability
and probability for the deductive sentences.
Thirdly, we investigated whether acceptability and
probability were highly correlated, as predicted by
(WAT3). Since the probability and acceptability were
tested between subjects, it was not possible to compute di-
rect correlations between both. In order to overcome this
difficulty, we computed the mean per sentence (ten abduc-
tive sentences, ten inductive sentences, and ten deductive
sentences) over the participants (for a similar approach see
Hadjichristidis et al. (2001)). In this way, we obtained a
mean for each of the 30 sentences. Then we computed
the correlations per type of conditional between probabil-
ity and acceptability. We do realize that averaging across
participants may conceal individual differences. However,
by manipulating probability and acceptability between
subjects, we can be absolutely sure that participants were
not influenced by the other variable. For the 30 sentences
in the experiment, probability and acceptability were
highly correlated: N = 30, R = .83, p < .05. Per type of condi-
tional, we found the following: for the abductive sen-
tences, probability and acceptability were highly
correlated: N = 10, R = .81, p < .05; for the inductive sen-
tences, probability and acceptability were correlated:
N = 10, R = .65, p < .05; for the deductive sentences, proba-
bility and acceptability were highly correlated: N = 10,
R = .88, p < .05.33
5.3. Discussion
The significant effect over all sentences between
acceptability and probability shows that the acceptability
of a conditional does not equal the conditional probability,
nor do the two approximately equal one another (on any
plausible reading of ‘‘approximately”). We have thus been
able to disprove Adams’s Thesis, both in its strict form (AT)
and in its approximate form (WAT1). We have further
demonstrated that (WAT2) does not hold either. On the
other hand, our results do support (WAT3): the acceptabil-
ity of a conditional highly correlates with the correspond-
ing conditional probability.
The most interesting results were obtained by compar-
ing the separate results for the three types of conditionals.
These comparisons suggest a family of Adams’s Theses. Our
data support the hypothesis that (AT), or at least (WAT1),
holds for DI conditionals, but not for either of the other
33
An anonymous reviewer worried that the materials of Experiment 1 are
rather one-sided as far as DI conditionals are concerned, given that in all
our DI items, the consequent follows deductively from the antecedent or
from the antecedent plus background premises. This reviewer suggested
that we also consider items in which this is not the case and even in which
the intuitively correct verdict about the given conditional is ‘‘highly
unacceptable.” A control experiment which takes up this suggestion is
presented in Appendix B. The results of that additional experiment are in
line with the results reported here.
310 I. Douven, S. Verbrugge / Cognition 117 (2010) 302–318
types. For AI conditionals, acceptability can still be said to
go strictly by conditional probability: there is a high corre-
lation between acceptability and conditional probability.
For II conditionals, not even this is true. At best, the accept-
ability of these conditionals could be said to go loosely by
conditional probability: the correlation between accept-
ability and conditional probability is only moderately high.
In short, our data suggest that (AT) or (WAT1) holds for DI
conditionals, that (WAT3) holds for AI conditionals, and
that only the exceedingly weak (WAT4) holds for II
conditionals.
6. Experiment 2
As mentioned in Section 4, acceptability, as the notion
occurs in the standard interpretation of Adams’s Thesis,
is meant in an epistemic sense, as indicating reasonable-
ness to believe. However, one cannot automatically as-
sume that this is how the participants of Experiment 1
understood the notion. For instance, they might have mis-
understood the questions about acceptability as asking
whether it would be appropriate to contribute the given
conditional to a conversation taking place in the relevant
context. To determine whether any such misunderstanding
was involved, we conducted a control experiment in
which, first, we compared responses to questions about
acceptability with responses to questions directly about
reasonableness to believe; and second, we asked the par-
ticipants who had been presented the questions about
acceptability how they had interpreted this notion.
6.1. Method
6.1.1. Participants
One hundred and sixty-three students of the University
of Leuven participated in the experiment as part of a course
requirement.
6.1.2. Design
The question concerning type of question (acceptable/
reasonable to believe) was manipulated between subjects.
The type of conditional (abductive/inductive/deductive)
was manipulated within subjects.
6.1.3. Materials and procedure
All materials were in Dutch, the participants’ mother
tongue. Fifteen items were presented to each participant
in a computer experiment. Items consisted of context–sen-
tence pairs. Every participant had to evaluate five abduc-
tive, five inductive, and five deductive items. Those five
items per type of conditional were, each time, randomly
chosen out of the list of ten items per type of conditional
of Experiment 1. The Fifteen items per test were presented
in a randomized order.
The participants were divided into two groups. We
asked the participants in the first group to judge the
acceptability of conditionals and those in the second group
to judge how reasonable it is to believe the conditionals.
Thus, the items presented to the first group were identical
to the items concerning acceptability that were presented
as part of Experiment 1. The items presented to the second
group differed from those only in that instead of ‘‘How
acceptable is this statement in the present context?,” the
participants were asked the question, ‘‘How reasonable is
it to believe this statement in the present context?” After
they had completed the experiment, the participants in
the first group were also asked how they had understood
the notion of acceptability.
6.2. Results
An ANOVA analysis with type of question as between
subjects variable and type of conditional as within subjects
variable revealed no effect of type of question and no inter-
action effect between type of question and type of condi-
tional; see Fig. 1. As expected, there was an effect of type
of conditional (F(2, 322) = 95,46; p < .0001).
The following is a representative sample of the qualita-
tive feedback we received in response to the question of
how the notion of acceptability was interpreted:
! Acceptable is that the sentence relates logically to the
story.
! As something that one can take to be true.
! When the sentence logically fits the context.
! I have interpreted ‘‘acceptable” as meaning that the
sentence flows from the situation described in the story.
! That it seemed logical to me that the represented event
would be true.
! As in: it would be a logical explanation.
! Something that one can assume or suppose.
! As something that seems reasonable and sensible.
! What seems logical, self-evident.
! Something that can be expected to be true given the
story.
6
5.5
Answer on 7-point scale
5
4.5
4
3.5
3
abductive inductive deductive
acceptability reasonable believability
Fig. 1. Comparison of acceptability and reasonable believability of
conditionals.
 I. Douven, S. Verbrugge / Cognition 117 (2010) 302–318
6.5
6 were obtained in Experiment 1.
Answer on 7-point scale
5.5
5 Twenty-five students of the University of Leuven partic-
4.5
4
3.5
3 abductive, ten inductive, and ten deductive context–sen-
abductive inductive deductive
probability of truth acceptability
conditional probability
Fig. 2. Conditional probability compared with acceptability and proba-
bility of truth of conditionals: for all types of conditionals, conditional
probability and probability of truth judgments match each other closely;
neither type of judgments matches acceptability judgments very closely.
Although it is not equally easy to make sense of each of
these answers, and although none of the participants di-
rectly stated that they had interpreted ‘‘acceptable” as
meaning ‘‘reasonable to believe,” the answers do suggest
that the notion of acceptability was interpreted in an epi-
stemic sense rather than in some other sense; things that
seem logical, or self-evident, or that can be taken to be
true, are probably things that are reasonable to believe,
though not obviously also things that it would be appropri-
ate to contribute to a conversation. Indeed, there was no
indication that any of the participants had understood
‘‘acceptable” as meaning something like ‘‘conforming to
broadly social norms governing good conversational
practice.”
In sum, given that the participants did not respond in
fundamentally different ways to the type of question, given
also the qualitative feedback that we received, the conclu-
sion is warranted that the notion of acceptability as it fig-
ured in our first experiment was understood as we
intended it to be.
7. Experiment 3
That the participants of our first experiment under-
stood the notion of acceptability in an epistemic sense
is consistent with the supposition that they interpreted
degree of acceptability as subjective probability. If they
did, then the results of Experiment 1 would conflict with
the findings of Evans, Over, and others cited in Section 4.
To see whether this was how the participants had inter-
preted the notion of acceptability, we conducted a fur-
ther experiment in which we asked the participants to
grade the probability of truth of the various conditionals
from Experiment 1. These probability judgments were
311
then compared both with the acceptability judgments
and with the conditional probability judgments that
7.1. Method
ipated as part of a course requirement. The participants
were asked to grade the probability of truth of the same
conditional sentences that were used in Experiment 1.
Materials were similar to the ones presented in Experi-
ment 1, the only difference being that the question of
how acceptable the given conditional is was replaced by
the question of how probable it is that the conditional is
true. So, here too, every participant had to evaluate ten
tence pairs.
The condition of probability of truth was added to the
two conditions of Experiment 1. So, in total the experiment
consisted of 92 participants: 25 new participants who
were asked about probability of truth and 67 participants
who in Experiment 1 were asked about acceptability (30)
and conditional probability (37).
7.2. Results
An ANOVA analysis with type of question (acceptability/
probability of truth/conditional probability) as between
subjects variable and type of conditional (abductive/induc-
tive/deductive) as within subjects variable revealed an ef-
fect of type of question (F(2, 89) = 18.64; p < .00001) and an
interaction effect between type of question and type of con-
ditional (F(4, 178) = 12.7; p < .0001). There was also an effect
of type of conditional (F(2, 178) = 388.08; p < .0001).
As for the main effect of type of question, planned com-
parisons revealed that probability of truth and conditional
probability did not differ from one another. Acceptability
differed from probability of truth (F(1, 89) = 21.36;
p < .0001) and from conditional probability (F(1, 89) =
33.27; p < .0001) (see Fig. 2).34
As for the main effect of type of conditional, planned
comparisons revealed that the abductive sentences did
not differ from the inductive sentences. The deductive sen-
tences differed from the abductive sentences
(F(1, 89) = 524.27; p < .01) and also from the inductive sen-
tences (F(1, 89) = 510.77; p < .01).
As for the interaction effect, planned comparisons re-
vealed that there was no significant difference between
conditional probability and probability of truth for the
abductive sentences. The same held for the inductive
and deductive sentences. There was a significant differ-
ence between conditional probability and acceptability
for the abductive sentences (F(1, 89) = 18.14; p < .0001)
and for the inductive sentences (F(1, 89) = 62.38;
p < .0001) but not for the deductive sentences.35 There
was also a significant difference between probability of
34
This was already stated in Section 5; we restate the result here for the
sake of completeness.
35
As was discussed in Section 5; the result is restated here for the sake of
completeness.
312 I. Douven, S. Verbrugge / Cognition 117 (2010) 302–318
truth and acceptability for the abductive sentences
(F(1, 89) = 11.60; p < .001) as well as for the inductive sen-
tences (F(1, 89) = 34.2; p < .0001) but not for the deductive
sentences.
Thus, this experiment warrants the conclusion that,
while participants understood the notion of acceptability
in an epistemic sense (as Experiment 2 made it reason-
able to assume), their acceptability judgments were not
simply their subjective probability judgments. Moreover,
given that we found a close match between judgments of
probability of truth of conditionals and corresponding
conditional probabilities, the experiment is in line with
Evans and Over’s findings and gives further support to
(Eq). In fact, it is shown here for the first time that
(Eq) holds for DI, II, and AI conditionals alike.
8. General discussion
Our experiments showed that neither is it generally
true that Ac(p ? q) = Pr(qjp), nor that Ac(p ? q) ! Pr(qjp),
nor that Ac(p ? q) is high (middling/low) whenever Pr(qjp)
is high (middling/low). On the positive side, the experi-
ments showed that the acceptability of inferential condi-
tionals highly correlates with their corresponding
conditional probabilities, at least when taken over all such
conditionals, though the experiments also showed that this
does not hold for the different types of inferential condi-
tionals considered separately.
One major lesson to be learned from these results is
that a popular strand of philosophical theorizing about
conditionals needs substantial rethinking. While many
philosophers assume explicitly – though presumably
merely on the basis of casual introspection – that (AT),
or at least some attenuated version thereof, is descrip-
tively correct, this assumption is not warranted by the
above findings. These suggest, in the best possible sce-
nario, a more nuanced picture, to wit, that in general
only the ‘‘high correlation thesis” (WAT3) can be main-
tained, but that when different types of conditionals
are considered separately, different versions of Adams’s
Thesis hold for them. This is the best possible scenario,
inasmuch as we have limited our attention to inferential
conditionals. The picture might become still more frag-
mented when content conditionals are taken into ac-
count as well.
Perhaps not all of the results should have come as a
surprise. Lowe (1996: p. 611 ff) had already pointed to
a problem regarding Adams’s view on conditionals. The
problem is closely related to the Lottery Paradox that
was briefly discussed in Section 4. Suppose we know that
a lottery is to be held, and know that the lottery is fair
and consists of 1,000,000 tickets, only one of which will
win. Then consider (given the present context) the II
conditional
(5) If we buy ticket # 14, we won’t win.
While the conditional probability of ‘‘We won’t win”
given ‘‘We buy ticket # 14” is close to 1, (5) appears
to be neither highly acceptable nor highly assertable.
Lowe took this fact to refute (AT).36 That might seem
rash, for (5) could have been an exception, a linguistic
curiosity, and therefore of little significance, given that
few (if any) theses about natural language (such as
Adams’s Thesis pretends to be) can be expected to hold
unexceptionably. Arguably, however, Lowe’s conditional
is not an isolated counterexample at all. For note that
while not all II conditionals are about lottery tickets, they
are like (5) in an important and relevant respect. Inferring
about Jim that he had at least a B for his statistics exam
on the supposition that he is a second-year psychology
student and given the background knowledge that 95%
of the second-year psychology students have at least a B
for their statistics exam (without further relevant back-
ground knowledge) is structurally no different from infer-
ring that you will lose, on the supposition that you bought
a ticket and given the background knowledge that the
ticket is one of a great number of tickets all belonging
to a fair lottery with only one winner (and no further rel-
evant background knowledge): in both cases it is inferred
that a particular individual has a given property from the
premise that the individual belongs to a certain class, and
the background statistical information that a certain high
percentage of the individuals in the class have the given
property. Accordingly, ‘‘If Jim is a second-year psychology
student, he has at least a B for his statistics exam”
expresses a reasoning process of the same type as is
expressed by (5). And we only need to imagine a suffi-
ciently high number of second-year psychology students
to make the former conditional as intuitively compelling
as a counterexample against (AT) as Lowe’s (5).
To be sure, this does little to explain why acceptability
and probability ratings match so poorly for II condition-
als, much less why there are the kind of differences
among the three types of conditionals that our experi-
ment uncovered. That there are these sort of differences
at all may simply reflect the fact that, as philosophers
unanimously agree, and as would seem obvious anyway,
the types of inference that underlie our typology differ
from an epistemological viewpoint in that they may
put us in different epistemic positions vis-à-vis the con-
clusions we reach by them on the basis of known or ac-
cepted premises. For instance, if q is an inductive
consequence of p, then coming to know the latter may
result in one’s coming to have a different – stronger,
weaker, or perhaps incomparably different – epistemic
position vis-à-vis q than if q were an abductive or deduc-
tive consequence of p instead. In principle, such differ-
ences could correspond to probabilistic differences, in
that the value of Pr(qjp) might lie within a certain inter-
val, depending on whether q is a deductive, inductive, or
36
Kaufmann (2004) also argues, though along very different lines, that
Adams’s proposal sometimes deviates starkly from intuition. However, as is
argued in Douven (2008c), our intuitive verdicts about the cases Kaufmann
depicts are highly dependent on how the probabilistic information relevant
to them is presented to us, and the kind of verdict that appears to militate
against Adams’s proposal may only follow because in Kaufmann’s examples
that information is presented in a way that psychologists have long known
to confuse people’s intuitions in predictable ways. Douven thus concludes
that the intuitions to which Kaufmann appeals are to be explained away
rather than explained.
 I. Douven, S. Verbrugge / Cognition 117 (2010) 302–318
abductive consequence of p, and where there is no over-
lap between the intervals. But this suggestion is already
a priori implausible, and the data we obtained make it
appear even more so. Hence, if the acceptability condi-
tions of conditionals are to be understood in terms of
an epistemic relationship between antecedent and conse-
quent, and if this relationship depends (whether wholly
or partly) on the kind of consequence relation that holds
between them, then that makes it understandable why
we found an interaction between the type to which a gi-
ven conditional belongs and its perceived acceptability.
Even if this is so, it still only provides a rather shallow
and unspecific explanation of our findings. We may be able
to dig a bit deeper by turning to the psychological litera-
ture on human reasoning. There is ample experimental evi-
dence indicating that the various types of inference differ
psychologically in important respects. For instance, there
is much evidence suggesting that deductive and nondeduc-
tive inference are processed differently from one another
(see, e.g., Evans & Over, 1996, Sloman, 1996, Stanovich,
1999, Rips, 2001). Parsons and Osherson (2001) even pres-
ent neuropsychological evidence to the effect that deduc-
tive and probabilistic reasoning are processed in different
brain hemispheres (see also Osherson et al., 1995; for a re-
lated study, see Goel & Dolan, 2004). And from the heuris-
tics-and-biases literature, we know that statistical
inference has a somewhat special, even problematic, sta-
tus. (See the papers in Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky,
1982, Gilovich et al., 2002; see also De Neys, 2006 & De
Neys & Verschueren, 2006.) Furthermore, it is known that
explanation is of special value with respect to memory,
and also that memory plays a key role in conditional rea-
soning (see Bransford & Johnson (1972) on the former
and Toms, Morris, & Ward (1993) on the latter). Finally,
Brem and Rips (2000) present studies showing that when
people are able to think of an explanation for some event,
they come to regard the occurrence of this event as being
more likely, and even tend to overrate its likelihood, at
least when they possess scarce evidence relevant to the
likelihood of that occurrence. But while these studies
may go some way towards explaining the kind of differ-
ences we found, we surmise that a specific explanation of
the results of our experiments will have to await a more
systematic investigation of the differences between deduc-
tive, inductive, and abductive reasoning – in terms of speed
of processing, proneness to error, use of working memory,
and similar apparently obvious parameters – than has
hitherto been carried out by psychologists.37
This brings us to another general lesson to be learned
from our studies, one that should be of particular interest
to psychologists working on conditionals. While it does
not follow from our results that important differences will
be found for the different types of conditionals in other
37
In his (1991), Evans complained about the fragmented state of
psychological theorizing concerning human reasoning, and by that he
meant only deductive reasoning. While since 1991, the situation certainly
seems to have improved as far as our knowledge of deductive reasoning
goes, we still seem to be far removed from a systematic and integrated
theory of reasoning in general (that is, also including inductive and
abductive reasoning).
313
areas of ongoing research on or involving conditionals38 –
such as research on the learning of conditionals and on rea-
soning tasks with conditionals – the results from Experi-
ments 1 and 2 do make it reasonable to check for possible
effects of type of conditional, and to guard against a one-
sided use of test items involving a particular type of
conditional.
Finally, it should be of some interest to linguists that
our typology of DI, II, and AI conditionals is not just simple
and grounded in a time-tested distinction between types of
inference, but also has considerable explanatory force. At a
minimum, it seems a valuable addition to the typologies
already to be found in the literature.
Acknowledgements
We are greatly indebted to three anonymous reviewers
for extremely detailed and valuable comments on a previ-
ous version of this paper and to Steven Sloman for useful
editorial advice. We are further grateful to Jean-François
Bonnefon, Richard Dietz, Kristien Dieussaert, Shira Elqa-
yam, Janneke Huitink, David Over, Niki Pfeifer, Walter
Schaeken, William Van Belle, and Christopher von Bülow
for helpful comments and discussion. Earlier versions of
this paper were presented at the First Formal Epistemology
Festival in Constance (July 2008), at the 31st Wittgenstein
Symposium in Kirchberg am Wechsel (August 2008), and
at the Fourth London Reasoning Workshop (July 2009).
We thank the audiences on those occasions for stimulating
questions and comments. For financial support, we would
like to thank the Government of the Flemish Community
(project ‘‘Formal Epistemology: Foundations and Applica-
tions”) and the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO).
Appendix A
This appendix presents the contexts and conditionals
that were used in Experiments 1–3.
DI Items:
Context: All students in class 6C have at least a B for
their math test paper.
Conditional: If Ben is in class 6C, then he has at least
a B for his math test paper.
Context: In the football competition, a won match
yields three points.
Conditional: If Anderlecht is seven points ahead of
Club Brugge, and there are only two matches to go
in this year’s competition, then Club Brugge cannot
become champion this year.
Context: All white cats possess a gene that predis-
poses them to develop blindness late in their lives.
38
Indeed, as shown in Section 7, (Eq) holds for each of the three types of
conditionals that we defined.
314 I. Douven, S. Verbrugge / Cognition 117 (2010) 302–318
Conditional: If Paul’s kitten is white, then it possesses
a gene that predisposes it to develop blindness late
in its life.
II Items:
Context: Two friends are wondering whether Cynthia
passed the exam. They know that it was an absolute
requirement for the exam to hand in a thesis before
the end of the semester.
Conditional: If Cynthia did not hand in her thesis
before the end of the semester, she failed.
Context: It is generally known that the bank is
always open on Fridays, except when the employees
go on an outing. It’s Friday, and Kathy is on her way
to the bank. She thinks:
Conditional: If the bank is closed, then the employees
are on an outing.39
Context: Every student that has less than a C for the
exam is required to retake the exam.
Conditional: If my classmate Joan has less than a C
for her exam, she is required to retake the exam.
Context: Students who belong to the top 10% of their
class each year will be able to write a good doctoral
thesis. Persons who are able to write a good doctoral
thesis are eligible for an externally funded PhD
position.
Conditional: If your fellow-student Stan belongs to
the top 10% of his class each year, he will be eligible
for an externally funded PhD position.
Context: Matt reads about a case of arson in the
newspaper. The police have a suspect in custody.
Arson is punished by imprisonment. He thinks:
Conditional: If the suspect is found guilty, he or she
will go to prison.
Context: Rational numbers are numbers that can be
written as a ratio of two natural numbers. Ellen
has written down a number on a slip of paper and
asks Carl to guess which number it is. Carl thinks:
Conditional: If Ellen has written down a rational
number, then the number on the slip of paper can
be written as a ratio of two natural numbers.
Context: Women who regularly exercise are at a 30%
decreased risk of developing osteoporosis.
39
One of the reviewers was concerned about the use of ‘‘except” in the
description of the context of this item. We therefore included the same
item without ‘‘except” in another experiment, specifying the context as
follows: ‘‘It is generally known that the local bank is closed on Fridays
whenever the employees go on an outing. Otherwise, the bank is open on
Fridays. It’s Friday, and Kathy is on her way to the bank.” For acceptability,
an analysis revealed no difference between the item with and without
‘‘except” occurring in the context description. Similarly, no difference was
found for the question concerning probability between the item with and
without ‘‘except.”
Conditionals: If Harriet regularly exercises, she is at a
decreased risk of developing osteoporosis.
Context: According to a recent report written on the
authority of the Dutch government, many primary
school students in the province of Friesland (where
many people still mainly speak Frisian) have diffi-
culty with spelling. Jitske is a student of a primary
school somewhere in the Netherlands.
Conditional: If Jitske goes to a Frisian primary school,
then she has difficulty with spelling.
Context: Most miners develop silicosis, a disease
caused by inhaling fine dust for a prolonged period
of one’s life.
Conditional: If Rudolph has worked in the mines for
all his life, then he has developed silicosis.
Context: A group of friends like to go shopping. Each
month they jointly visit some interesting shoe
shops. Most members of the group own at least 20
pairs of shoes.
Conditional: If Aline is a member of that group, she
has at least 20 pairs of shoes.
Context: Today is Saturday and you want to return a
book to the library. The library is hardly ever closed
on Saturdays. If it is, then that is mostly because
Luke, the librarian, is sick.
Conditional: If the library is closed today, then Luke
is sick.
Context: According to the local bus company, none of
their buses has been more than 5 min late in the past
2 years.
Conditional: If our bus is not exactly on time, it will
at most be a few minutes late.
Context: A pharmaceutical company unexpectedly
got into financial trouble. They had to cut many jobs
and decided to fire most employees above fifty.
Mark is an employee of this company.
Conditional: If Mark is above 50, he has been fired.
Context: The police received an anonymous tip that a
known terror group has planned an attack. They are
trying to determine when the attack might take
place. They know that large-scale attacks mostly
take place during morning rush hours.
Conditional: If the group wants to kill a great many
people, the attack will take place during morning
rush hours.
Context: You are employed at the incident room of a
company that guards all banks and other financial
 I. Douven, S. Verbrugge / Cognition 117 (2010) 302–318
institutions in the neighborhood. You were told that
false alarms are not rare, and that the local bank has
a particularly bad reputation in this respect: the
majority of their alarms are false. Suddenly there is
an alarm. You say to your colleague:
Conditional: If this alarm is from the local bank, it is
false.flase
Context: Dick is a bit of an irregular student: some-
times he works hard, but he can also be lazy. So far
he had excellent grades for most courses for which
he had worked hard.
Conditional: If Dick works hard for the linguistics
course, then he will get an excellent grade for it.
Context: You know that today Jessica, the girl next door,
will hear whether she passed her finals. As far as you
know, Jessica has always been a serious student. Your
neighbors (her parents) are normally quiet people but
they like to celebrate joyful events in a somewhat noisy
fashion. For instance, when Jessica’s elder brothers and
sisters passed their finals, the stereo each time went on
maximal loudness. In the afternoon you suddenly hear
loud music. You cannot immediately determine from
which direction it is coming. But:
Conditional: If this music comes from the neighbors,
then Jessica has passed her finals.
AI Items:
Context: You strongly doubt that Hank will have
passed the first-year examination. You suspect that
his parents will buy him a car only if he passed that
examination. You suddenly see Hank driving a new
car.
Conditional: If the car Hank is driving is his, then he
passed the first-year examination.
Context: Nelly lives on the sixth floor of an apart-
ment building. The elevator has been broken since
earlier this morning. A good friend of Nelly’s who
lives on the third floor of the same building hears
someone rushing down the stairs. She knows that
Nelly is not very sports-loving. She therefore thinks:
Conditional: If that’s Nelly rushing down the stairs,
then she is in a hurry.
Context: You know that Tom and Hank recently had
a flaming row which, you think, ended their friend-
ship for good. Now a friend tells you that she thinks
she just saw Tom and Hank jogging together. She
may well be mistaken, but you think:
Conditional: If Tom and Hank are jogging together
again, they are friends again.
Context: Someone tells you that a nearby village has
been flooded. You doubt that this is true, but if it is,
315
then the most likely cause of the flooding is the
breaking of the dam.
Conditional: If the village has been flooded, the dam
is broken.
Context: Judy is waiting for the train. She is looking
for her iPod to listen to some music while she waits.
It is not in her coat. Yet she is sure that she took it
this morning. Perhaps it is in her bag. Then she sees
that the zipper of her bag is open. She cannot
remember that she opened it. At that moment there
is an announcement that pickpockets are active in
the train station.
Conditional: If Judy’s iPod is not in her bag, then
someone has stolen it.
Context: The police are investigating a homicide. The
body was found in a morass. The police have a prime
suspect. At the suspect’s home, they are looking for
his shoes. One of the detectives says:
Conditional: If we find muddy shoes, then he was at
the crime scene.
Context: Pete had to play the finals of a tennis tour-
nament earlier today. Two friends of his, who do not
yet know the result of the match, are walking to
Pete’s house. From a distance, it seems to them that
there is a party going on in Pete’s garden. One of
them says:
Conditional: If Pete is partying, he has won the match.
Context: In an archive, letters have been found that
may have been written by Ludwig van Beethoven.
The author of these letters has put some symbols
in the margins whose meaning is unclear. According
to the historians studying the letters, the best expla-
nation for the presence of these symbols is that the
author was a freemason.
Conditional: If these letters are van Beethoven’s
indeed, then he was a freemason.
Context: Mary invited archenemies Betty and Chris
to her party tonight. She does not expect Chris to
come; he does not seem to be very fond of parties.
On the other hand, she knows that Chris likes to irri-
tate Betty.
Conditional: If Chris comes to the party, then he
wants to irritate Betty tonight.
Context: The government has taken measures
against the increasing pollution of the soil. It is not
certain that these will be effective. There is also a
chance that, through natural causes, soil pollution
will be halted. Yet experts agree that a decrease in
soil pollution in the coming years would be most
reasonably explained by the effectiveness of the
measures taken.
316 I. Douven, S. Verbrugge / Cognition 117 (2010) 302–318
Conditional: If we shall witness a decrease in soil pol-
lution in the next years, then the measures taken by
the government are effective.
Appendix B
In response to the reviewer’s concern mentioned in
note 33 about the DI items used in our experiments, we
conducted an experiment that included five items in which
the conditional’s consequent followed deductively from its
antecedent, or from its antecedent together with back-
ground premises provided by the context, and five items
in which this was not the case. In fact, to accommodate
the reviewer’s suggestion that we consider items for which
the intuitive verdict about the given conditional is ‘‘highly
unacceptable,” we took five items in which the negation of
the conditional’s consequent followed deductively from
the conditional’s antecedent, or from the antecedent to-
gether with background premises. Specifically, for the
present experiment we reused the first five context–condi-
tional pairs of the DI items listed in Appendix A and com-
bined them with the following items:
Context: This winter, all people older than 65 will be
vaccinated for the Mexican flu.
Conditional: If Mrs. Van Damme is older than 65, she
won’t be vaccinated for the Mexican flu this winter.
Context: The freshmen recently had a statistics exam.
Only those who scored at least 8/20 are allowed to resit.
Conditional: If Paul (a freshman) scored 6/20 for the sta-
tistics exam, he is allowed to resit.
Context: A pharmaceutical is testing a new drug to help
people who want to quit smoking. Only people who
have been smoking for 2 years or longer are eligible as
test persons. Renée started smoking a year ago.
Conditional: If Renée wants to participate in this test,
then she will be admitted.
Context: All Indian elephants have small ears.
Conditional: If the elephant Babou has big ears, then
Babou is an Indian elephant.
Context: According to the Belgian constitution, only Bel-
gian citizens are eligible for a seat in the Belgian
parliament.
Conditional: If Günther has only German nationality,
then he is eligible for a seat in the Belgian parliament.
Method
Sixty-nine students of the University of Leuven partici-
pated in the experiment as part of a course requirement.
The question concerning probability/acceptability was
manipulated between subjects. The type of conditional
(follows/does not follow) was manipulated within sub-
jects. The participants were asked to evaluate the 10
above-mentioned items, which were presented to them
in a booklet. Items were randomized per booklet and the
booklets were randomly distributed in the lecture hall.
The participants were divided into two groups. We asked
one group to judge acceptability of the conditionals and
another group to judge the corresponding conditional
probabilities.
Results
An ANOVA analysis with follows/does not follow as within
subjects variable and acceptability/probability as between
subjects variable showed that there was no effect of
acceptability/probability and no interaction effect. Unsur-
prisingly, there was an effect of follows/does not follow
(F(1, 67) = 1208.2; p < 0001). Moreover, correlations
showed that there was a high correlation between accept-
ability and probability for the 10 items (N = 10; Spearman
R = 0.95; p < .0001).
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