Modals with a taste of the deontic
نویسندگان
چکیده
The aim of this paper is to present an explanation for the impact of normative considerations on people’s assessment of certain seemingly purely descriptive matters concerning freedom, causation, and intentionality. The explanation is based on two main claims. First, the relevant judgments are modal: the sentences evaluated are contextually equivalent to modal proxies. Second, the interpretation of predominantly circumstantial or teleological modals is subject to constraints which make certain possibilities salient at the expense of others.
منابع مشابه
On the Scopal Interaction of Negation and Deontic Modals
In this paper we argue that the different scopal relations that deontic modal auxiliaries cross-linguistically exhibit can be explained by assuming that (i) polarity effects arise in the domain of universal deontic modals and therefore not in the domain of existential deontic modals; and (ii) that all deontic modals must be interpreted VP in situ if their polarity requirements allow for that.
متن کامل“Might” Made Right
Kratzer’s picture [, , ]: • Modals are quantifiers over possible worlds. • Possibility modals are existential quantifiers, necessity modals are universal quantifiers. They are duals of each other. • Modals quantify over the worlds given by a background such as “in view of what the laws are” (i.e. the worlds compatible with what the laws are in the evaluation world). • The “ambiguity” betwe...
متن کاملDeontic Modals and Probabilities: One Theory to Rule Them All? (Abstract)
1. Synopsis. I defend and develop a probabilistic premise semantics for deontic modals. The probabilistic component is motivated by considering embeddings of deontic modals in conditionals with probabilistic antecedents. To make room for probabilities, premises are treated as properties of alternatives (and not of individual worlds). The theory can be shown to be importantly different from the ...
متن کاملDeontic and Epistemic Modals in Suppositional [Inquisitive] Semantics∗
In Groenendijk and Roelofsen (2015) a suppositional semantics for implication is proposed within the general framework of inquisitive semantics. Our aim is to extend this semantic approach to epistemic and deontic modals, but, for the purposes of this short paper, we bracketed off inquisitive aspects of meaning. To illustrate the semantics we discuss a semantic solution to a Jackson inspired pu...
متن کاملEvidence Sensitivity in Weak Necessity Deontic Modals
Kolodny and MacFarlane () have made a pioneering contribution to our understanding of how the interpretation of deontic modals can be sensitive to evidence and information. But integrating the discussion of informationsensitivity into the standard Kratzerian framework for modals suggests ways of capturing the relevant data without treating deontic modals as “informational modals” in their s...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
دوره شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2013