Semantics etc.

[Back from a short trip to Germany. Cleaning out the deskdrawer.]

Two papers on epistemic modality:

“John MacFarlane”:http://socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Ejmacf/work.html, “Epistemic Modalities and Relative Truth”:http://socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Ejmacf/epistmod.pdf

bq. I want to discuss a puzzle about the semantics of epistemic modals, like “It might be the case that” as it occurs in “It might be the case that Goldbach’s conjecture is false.” I’ll argue that the puzzle cannot be adequately explained on standard accounts of the semantics of epistemic modals, and that a proper solution requires relativizing utterance truth to a context of assessment, a semantic device whose utility and coherence I have defended elsewhere for future contingents.

“Andy Egan”:http://www.geocities.com/eganamit/papers.html, John Hawthorne and Brian Weatherson. “Epistemic Modals in Context”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/em.pdf

bq. In the 1970s David Lewis argued for a contextualist treatment of modals (Lewis 1976, 1979a). Although Lewis was primarily interested in modals connected with freedom and metaphysical possibility, his arguments for contextualism could easily be taken to support contextualism about epistemic modals. In the 1990s Keith DeRose argued for just that position (DeRose 1991, 1998).
In all contextualist treatments, the method by which the contextual variables get their values is not completely specified. For contextualist treatments of metaphysical modality, the important value is the class of salient worlds. For contextualist treatments of epistemic modality, the important value is which epistemic agents are salient. In this paper, we start by investigating how these values might be generated, and conc lude that there’s no plausible story to be told about how they are generated. There are too many puzzle cases for a simple contextualist theory to be true, and a complicated contextualist story is implausibly ad hoc.
We then look at what happens if we replace contextualism with relativism. On contextualist theories the truth of an utterance type is relative to the context in which it is tokened. On relativist theories, the truth of an utterance token is also relative to the context in which it is evaluated. Many of the puzzles for contextualism turn out to have natural, even elegant, solutions given relativism. We conclude by comparing two versions of relativism, one due to John MacFarlane (2003, ms) and one motivated by David Lewis’s work on de se belief. We will start with a puzzle about the role of epistemic modals in speech reports.

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