Dr. Pfeifer will speak about current topics of his interest that include coherence, conditionals, formal epistemology, paradoxes of the material conditional, probability logic, and the psychology of reasoning.
There is a long tradition in formal epistemology and in the psychology of reasoning to investigate indicative conditionals. In psychology, the propositional calculus was taken for granted to be the normative standard of reference. Experimental tasks, evaluation of the participants’ responses and psychological model building, were inspired by the semantics of the material conditional. Recent empirical work on indicative conditionals focuses on uncertainty. Consequently, the normative standard of reference has changed.
Dr. Pfeifer will discuss why neither logic nor standard probability theory provide appropriate rationality norms for uncertain conditionals.