No abstract

In recent work, MacFarlane [] and Egan et al. [] have used new observations about epistemic modals to motivate radical new semantic analyses. MacFarlane introduces a triple-indexed semantics which makes sentences with epistemic modals not just sensitive to the context of utterance and an index of evaluation but also to a context of assessment. Egan et al. propose that epistemically modalized sentences do not express standard propositions but functions from individuals to propositions, something like centered propositions. We will argue that these moves are not only problematic but also unnecessary.

Epistemic modals are standardly taken to be context-dependent quantifiers over possibilities. Thus sentences containing them get truth-values with respect to both a context and an index. But some insist that this relativization is not relative enough: `might'-claims, they say, only get truth-values with respect to contexts, indices, and—the new wrinkle—points of assessment (hence, cia). Here we argue against such “relativist” semantics. We begin with a sketch of the motivation for such theories and a generic formulation of them. Then we catalogue central problems that any such theory faces. We end by outlining an alternative story.

No abstract

What we want to be true about ordinary indicative conditionals seems to be more than we can possibly get: there just seems to be no good way to assign truth-conditions to ordinary indicative conditionals. Some take this argument as reason to make our wantings more modest. Others take it to show that indicative conditionals don't have truth-conditions in the first place. But we have overlooked two possibilities for assigning truth-conditions to indicatives. What's more, those possibilities deliver what we want and turn out to be equivalent.