Epistemic Modals

نویسنده

  • Seth Yalcin
چکیده

Epistemic modal operators give rise to something very like, but also very unlike, Moore’s paradox. I set out the puzzling phenomena, explain why a standard relational semantics for these operators cannot handle them, and recommend an alternative semantics. A pragmatics appropriate to the semantics is developed and interactions between the semantics, the pragmatics, and the definition of consequence are investigated. The semantics is then extended to probability operators. Some problems and prospects for probabilistic representations of content and context are explored.

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Expressivism Concerning Epistemic Modals

In this paper, a new argument for an expressivist account of epistemic modals is developed. The argument starts from a puzzle about epistemic modals that Seth Yalcin recently presented. Yalcin’s own solution to the puzzle is rejected and a better explanation is given which is based on expressivism concerning epistemic modals. Furthermore, two alleged problems for expressivism are addressed: fir...

متن کامل

9 Epistemic

I have a puzzle about epistemic modals.1 I spell it out in the next two sections ( 2-3). The puzzle teaches, I eventually say, that ‘possibly’, ‘probably’, and the rest of the epistemic modals do not designate functions which yield, as output, propositions. As a result, the puzzle tells against standard truth-conditional approaches to the semantics of epistemic modals ( 4), and also against mor...

متن کامل

Wondering What Might Be

This paper explores the possibility of supplementing the suppositional view of indicative conditionals with a corresponding view of epistemic modals. The most striking feature of the suppositional view consists in its claim that indicative conditionals are to be evaluated by conditional probabilities. On the basis of a natural link between indicative conditionals and epistemic modals, a corresp...

متن کامل

On the semantics and pragmatics of epistemic modals

This paper explores a rich source of data for theories of this vocabulary. The debate over the viability of standard truth conditional theories has called attention to the distinctive behavior of epistemic vocabulary in eavesdropping judgments, indicative suppositions, and statements of disagreement and retraction. But extant accounts are not sufficiently sensitive to distinctive features of th...

متن کامل

Epistemic Modals and Informational Consequence

Recently, Yalcin (2007) put forward a novel account of epistemic modals. It is based on the observation that sentences of the form ‘φ& Might¬φ’ do not embed under ‘suppose’ and ‘if’. Yalcin concludes that such sentences must be contradictory and develops a notion of informational consequence which validates this idea. I will show that informational consequence is inadequate as an account of the...

متن کامل

Judge dependence , epistemic modals , and predicates of personal taste

Predicates of personal taste (fun, tasty) and epistemic modals (might, must) share a similar analytical difficulty in determining whose taste or knowledge is being expressed. Accordingly, they have parallel behavior in attitude reports and in a certain kind of disagreement. On the other hand, they differ in how freely they can be linked to a contextually salient individual, with epistemic modal...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره   شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2007