Scope ambiguities and conditionals

摘要

Scope ambiguities in natural language have been much discussed by linguists and philosophers. There has been some psychological work on the scope ambiguities of negation, but we present the first experiments on modal scope ambiguities in conditionals, with special attention paid to the scope ambiguities of the probability operator. We also discuss the implications of our results for the assessment of the conditional probability hypothesis, according to which the probability of a conditional is the probability of its consequent given its antecedent.