Epistemic Modals and Sensitivity to Contextually-Salient Partitions

Abstract

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.

Alethic pluralism, deflationism, and faultless disagreement

“…Relativism about indicative conditionals is sympathetically discussed by Kolodny and MacFarlane (2010) and Weatherson (2009). Relativism about probability statements has been proposed by Douven (2011) and discussed by Yu (2016); a relativistic treatment of future contingents has been discussed by Belnap, Perloff, and Xu (2001).…”

Semantic expressivism for epistemic modals

“…For an overview and discussion, seeCariani (2017). Also seeMoss (2015),Swanson (2016) andYu (2016).22 Another counter-example to disjunctive syllogism might be afoot. To our ears, the following is also an appropriate claim in the context of our coin scenario: (*) It must have landed heads or it must have landed tails.…”