'...that P is relevant for Q': Indicative conditionals and learning from testimony
- Karolina Krzyzanowska, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Peter Collins, Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, United Kingdom
- Ulrike Hahn, Centre for Cognition Computation and Modelling/Dept. off Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London, London, United Kingdom
AbstractOur beliefs change with learning, and much of what we learn comes from the testimony of other people. How much our beliefs change may depend on how many people are the sources of a given piece of information, and how reliable their expertise makes them. It is not clear, however, what exactly the effects of reliability or number of speakers will be when the testimony has the form of an indicative conditional. Here, we test the hypothesis that learning a conditional amounts to increasing the degree to which the antecedent of that conditional is relevant for its consequent. Furthermore, we investigate whether this is affected by number of speakers and by their expertise.