The first part of this chapter will discuss aspects of Veltman's chapter in this volume ‘Data semantics and the pragmatics of indicative conditionals’, and particularly his semantics for conditionals, while the second will comment on more general methodological issues having to do with relations between three seemingly disparate theories: (1) Grice's theories of meaning and conversational implicature, (2) the Bayesian theory of decision making, and (3) my own probabilistic theory of conditionals. The discussion of Veltman's chapter will presuppose familiarity with technical aspects of the theory presented there.

The central concept of Veltman's theory is that of a sentence being true in an information state in an information model, which is a ternary relation between sentences, information states, and information models. What we want to ask is how this ternary relation is related to the property of truth, which is what Tarski (1944) insists the sort of truth that satisfies Convention T must be.