Conditionals: Truth, safety, and success

Abstract

Whether I take some action that aims at desired consequence C depends on whether or not I take it to be true that if I so act, I will bring C about and that if I do not, I will fail to. And the action will succeed if and only if my beliefs are true. We argue that two theses follow: (I) To believe a conditional is to be disposed to infer its consequent from the truth of its antecedent, and (II) The conditional is true iff the inference would not make a true belief in the antecedent cause a false belief in the consequent.