Nested conditionals and genericity in the de Finetti semantics

The trivalent, truth-functional theory of conditionals proposed by de Finetti in 1936 and developed in a scattered literature since has enjoyed a recent revival in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. However, several theorists have argued that this approach is fatally flawed in that it cannot correctly account for nested conditionals and compounds of conditionals. Focusing on nested conditionals, we observe that the problem cases uniformly involve generic predicates, and that the inference patterns claimed to be problematic are very plausible when we ensure that only non-generic (episodic and stative) predicates are used. In addition, the trivalent theory makes correct predictions about the original, generic counter-examples when combined with an off-the-shelf theory of genericity. The ability of the trivalent semantics to account for this complex interaction with genericity thus appears as a strong argument in its favor.