Notes on Epistemic Modals
نویسنده
چکیده
(a) the modal auxiliaries ‘might’ and ‘must’, (b) the (sentential) adverbs ‘possibly’ and ‘probably’, (c) the various sentential operators that can be constructed from the modal adjectives ‘possible’ and ‘probable’, such as ‘it’s (very) possible that’, ‘it’s (very) probable that’, ‘there is a strong possibility that’, ‘is at least as probable as’, ‘is more probable than’, etc., and (d) those operators constructible from ‘likely’.
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 کاملWondering 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 کامل9 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 کاملOn 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 کاملEpistemic 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