Conditionals, Truth, and Assertion This chapter argues that the
conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent
is crucial to understanding indicative conditionals. However,
unlike Jackson, it denies that the truth value of an indicative
conditional is given by the corresponding material conditional.
To begin with are the difficulties that embedded conditionals
(i.e. conditionals which have conditional antecedents and/or
consequents) present to Jackson. Jackson is aware that embedded
conditionals present problems to his approach, and argues that
‘If A then (if B then C)’ is regarded by English users as
interchangeable with ‘If (A and B) then C’. Since the latter
contains no embedded conditionals, the problem is avoided.
However, the proposed solution fails to generalize in
satisfactory ways to connectives like ‘but’ and ‘even’. In
addition, Jackson's approach to conditionals is restricted to
conditionals used to make assertions, and does not readily
generalize to conditionals used in other kind