Two Causal-Modeling Approaches to Indicative Conditionals
Studies in Logic, Vol. 18, No. 6 (2025): 43–61 PII: 16743202(2025)06004319
ChingHui Su
Abstract. Recently there have been two causal modelling approaches to indicative conditionals, i.e. extrapolationist (Deng & Lee, 2021) and filterist (Liang & Wang, 2022), although they all take an interventionist position on subjunctive conditionals. Motivated by the so-called OK pairs, they try to provide a convincing explanation of the intuition underlying the OK pairs. As far as we know, what they have done is to provide not only an explanation of the OK pairs, but also a way of distinguishing between indicative and subjunctive conditionals. Although we agree with their success in explaining the OK pairs within a causal modelling framework, we argue that their ways of distinguishing between indicative and subjunctive conditionals fail. Instead, we argue that their approaches can be used to distinguish between two readings of conditionals, the epistemic reading and the ontic reading, which can be applied to both indicative and subjunctive conditionals. We conclude by arguing that these two readings are related to two approaches to asking and answering causal questions: the “causes-of-effects” approach and the “effects-of-causes” approach.