Issues in Reasoning about Iffy Propositions: “The” Interpretation(s) of Conditionals

Recent studies indicate that a vast majority of people judge the probability of a conditional as to the conditional probability of (Evans, Handley, & Over, 2003; Oberauer &Wilhelm;, 2003). This means that in evaluating the applicability of a conditional people do not seem to take count of situations in which the antecedent event is false. This has been taken as evidence against the model theory (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 2002). This theory, however, claims that the conditional interpretation in which false-antecedent cases are relevant is only one of many possible interpretations of ‘if’. We present new evidence that confirms this flexibility of the interpretive system. When people are primed by thinking (a) about truth and the difference between the and or (b) are invited to judge which situations are consistent with the conditional, they are more likely to select a probability estimate that takes count of the false-antecedent cases.