Capturing the relationship between conditionals and conditional probability with a trivalent semantics

Intuitively, it seems that both sentences are of the form: it’s likely that x, where, in the first case, x = Georgia will join the E.U. and, in the second case, x = if Russia needs foreign aid, Georgia will join the E.U.. Understanding how these ∗I am grateful to Chris Barker, Paul Égré, Linda Rothschild, James Shaw, Robbie Williams, and Seth Yalcin for pointing out some errors and giving helpful comments on earlier drafts. Also thanks to Kai von Fintel and Robbie Williams for giving me some crucial references. Kratzer (1981, 1986) denies this syntactic parsing, claiming that the function of “if”-clauses is to restrict higher up modal quantifiers in the sentence, in the case of (1-b) the natural choice is the probability operator it’s likely that. While there is much to be said for her view, I think that, generally speaking, her strategy will not easily explain all the recalcitrant facts about probability and conditionals that the proposal presented below aims to. For example, many judge (i) to have the same truth conditions as (1-b):