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Keywords:

Social Sciences, Psychology, Experimental, Psychology, Scope ambiguities, Conditionals, Conditional probability, Epistemic modals, the Equation, PROBABILITY, 1701 Psychology, 1702 Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology, 5202 Biological psychology, 5204 Cognitive and computational psychology, 5205 Social and personality psychology

Abstract:

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. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.