When adjunction fails

Choh Man Teng

pp. 501-510

in: Horacio Arló-Costa, Gregory Wheeler (eds), Commemorating the work of Henry E. Kyburg Jr., Synthese 186 (2), 2012.

Abstract

The rule of adjunction is intuitively appealing and uncontroversial for deductive inference, but in situations where information can be uncertain, the rule is neither needed nor wanted for rational acceptance, as illustrated by the lottery paradox. Practical certainty is the acceptance of statements whose chances of error are smaller than a prescribed threshold parameter, when evaluated against an evidential corpus. We examine the failure of adjunction in relation to the threshold parameter for practical certainty, with an eye towards reinstating the rule of adjunction in some restricted forms, by observing the conditions under which the overall chance of error of the joint statements can be variously bounded.