Our beliefs change with learning, and much of what we learncomes from the testimony of other people. How much our be-liefs change may depend on how many people are the sourcesof a given piece of information, and how reliable their expertisemakes them. It is not clear, however, what exactly the effectsof reliability or number of speakers will be when the testimonyhas the form of an indicative conditional. Here, we test the hy-pothesis that learning a conditional amounts to increasing thedegree to which the antecedent of that conditional is relevantfor its consequent. Furthermore, we investigate whether this isaffected by number of speakers and by their expertise.

ndicative conditionals, that is sentences of the form “If p, thenq,” belong to the most puzzling phenomena of language. Onthe majority of accounts of indicative conditionals, the truth ofp and q suffices for “If p, then q” to be true or highly accept-able. Yet, many conditionals with true clauses, even if there isa meaningful connection between them, sound odd. The mostcommon reaction to this phenomenon is to attribute the oddityof conditionals with true clauses to natural language pragmat-ics. We present an experimental study investigating how thepresence or absence of a connection between the clauses af-fects the assertability of conditionals and conjunction express-ing generic and specific kind of content. The results refute thestandard pragmatic explanation.

Much of what we believe to know, we know through the testimony of others (Coady, 1994). Whether the resultant beliefs constitute knowledge or erroneous beliefs consequently rests directly on the reliability of our sources. While there has been long-standing evidence that people are sensitive to source characteristics, for example in the context of persuasion, exploration of the wider implications of source reliability considerations for the nature of our beliefs has begun only fairly recently. Likewise, much remains to be established concerning what factors influence source reliability. In this paper, we examine, both theoretically and empirically, the implications of using message content as a cue to source reliability.