Expressivists and relativists about epistemic modals often motivate their view by arguing against contextualist treatments of certain cases. However, I argue that even expressivists and relativists should consider being a kind of contextualist. Specifically, data involving mixed disjunctions motivate taking epistemic modals to be sensitive to contextually-salient partitions, and thus context-sensitive.Keywords epistemic modals; contextualism; expressivism; relativism; partitions; disjunction DOI:10.1002/tht3.203
Expressivism and relativism about epistemic modalsThe most plausible accounts of descriptivism about epistemic modals are also contextualist, in that the information state-body of knowledge, belief, or evidence-relevant for the evaluation of epistemic modal sentences depends on context. 1 Accordingly, epistemic modal sentences concern the possibility, necessity, or likelihood of certain propositions relative to contextually-determined information states. Noting this, expressivists and relativists often motivate their view by arguing against contextualist treatments of certain cases, taking the presumed success of their arguments against contextualism to automatically disqualify any combination of descriptivism and contextualism. 2 However, I argue that even expressivists and relativists should consider being a kind of contextualist. Specifically, data involving mixed disjunctions motivate taking epistemic modals to be sensitive to contextually-salient partitions, and thus context-sensitive.In the rest of this section, I outline expressivism and relativism about epistemic modals. In Section 2, I present data, involving mixed disjunctions, that should inform our semantic theorizing. In Section 3, I present a domain semantics, which I take expressivists and relativists to want to adopt, showing that it fares poorly in light of our data. In Section 4, I suggest incorporating a refinement for a domain semantics that takes epistemic modals to be sensitive to contextually-salient partitions.Let me begin by saying a bit more about expressivists and relativists. Consider an ordinary sentence such as:(1) It's raining.
In this paper, I motivate a modal account of propositions on the basis of an iterative conception of propositions. As an application, I suggest that the account provides a satisfying solution to (a version of) the Russell-Myhill paradox. The account is in the spirit of recently developed modal accounts of sets motivated on the basis of the iterative conception of sets.1 Two qualifications are in order. First, for simplicity, I focus on propositions that ascribe monadic properties to individual objects, or pluralities of objects; I set aside propositions that ascribe relations to sequences of objects, as well as complex (negative, conjunctive, and disjunctive) and quantified propositions. Second, following the standard understanding, the locution "the plurality of objects" is meant to pick out just the objects themselves, rather than anything over and above them.
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