CAUSAL AND CONDITIONAL INFERENCES - A COMMENT ON CUMMINS (1995)

Cummins (1995) offers an analysis of causal and truth-functional suffi ciency and necessity to predict and explain the effects on conditional inferences of two pragmatic factors: alternative causes and disabling conditions. However, the justification of these predictions is incons istent. This note offers a modified analysis which puts her prediction s on a sounder base: it is proposed that alternative causes and disabl ing conditions affect judgments of argument validity under three diffe rent models for the causal conditional.