  Why did Ramsey issue these warnings? Here is one example which may be what he had in mind. Mary is an atheist. However, if she were to learn that she had a fatal disease, she would acquire a belief in God. But she doesn’t now believe “If I get a fatal disease, there is a God”! Another example: I am about to pick a card and look at it. I know there are three kings in the pile, two red and one black. My conditional degree of belief that I pick a red card, given that I pick a king, is 2/3. That determines the odds on which I would bet on Red given King. But if I do pick a king, I won’t have a degree of belief 2/3 that it is red. I am not colour blind. Then there examples like Lewis’s “If Reagan was in the pay of the KGB, we’ll never find out”. This is something he believes. But if he were to learn the antecedent, he would not then believe the consequent! As Lewis says, “It might be no easy thing to judge what would be learned if [\(A\)] were learned, in view of the variety of ways that something might be learned” (1986, 156). He concludes that a conditional degree of belief is a good but fallible guide to the degree of belief you would have in \(B\) if you learned \(A\). Edgington’s (1995) reply to Read, §1, discusses the disparity between what Ramsey himself said, and much that goes under the name “the Ramsey Test”. In the famous footnote, Ramsey speaks of people “adding \(p\) hypothetically to their stock of knowledge” – that is, supposing that \(p\). The consequences of doing so for one’s conditional beliefs, is not invariably equivalent to the consequences of coming to believe \(p\), for one’s unconditional beliefs.