A conservative theory of gradable modality

Pasternak, Robert

doi:10.3765/salt.v26i0.3805

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Rubinstein (2012) demurs, giving a detailed treatment of this item as a universal teleological modal, but without relating this interpretation to a scalar concept of necessity. Klecha (2014); Pasternak (2016) give various theories of the gradability of important, and Portner & Rubinstein (2016) treat this item along with crucial, must, and should. There is a large logical and philosophical literature on graded notions of preference with interesting connections to deontic semantics (Hansson 2001), but little or no work relating these ideas to the interpretation of prefer and related items.…”

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Graded Modality

Lassiter¹

2017

Oxford Scholarship Online

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This book explores graded expressions of modality, a rich and underexplored source of insight into modal semantics. Studies on modal language to date have largely focussed on a small and non-representative subset of expressions, namely modal auxiliaries such as must, might, and ought. Here, Daniel Lassiter argues that we should expand the conversation to include gradable modals such as more likely than, quite possible, and very good. He provides an introduction to qualitative and degree semantics for graded meaning, using the Representational Theory of Measurement to expose the complementarity between these apparently opposed perspectives on gradation. The volume explores and expands the typology of scales among English adjectives and uses the result to shed light on the meanings of a variety of epistemic and deontic modals. It also demonstrates that modality is deeply intertwined with probability and expected value, connecting modal semantics with the cognitive science of uncertainty and choice.

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Graded Modality

Lassiter¹

2017

Oxford Scholarship Online

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Graded Modality

Lassiter

2020

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics

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Obligation, goodness, certainty, likelihood, knowledge, belief, and ability are examples of modal concepts – concepts whose conditions for application depend not only on how the real world is, but also on various non‐actual ways that the world could be. Ought , good , certain , likely , know , believe , and be able are examples of modal words whose meaning is closely related to the modal concepts just mentioned. Is there graded structure underlying (at least some) modal concepts – are they all‐or‐nothing, or can they come in degrees? To the extent that there is, how should semanticists model the meanings of modal expressions whose meanings make reference to graded concepts? Modals are usually thought of as (non‐graded) quantificational expressions, but there is also a tradition of treating some modal concepts – such as goodness, likelihood, and obligation – on the analogy of graded concepts like height, weight, and temperature. Recently there has been increased attention to scalar aspects of the meanings of modal expressions, but there are still many interesting open questions about how far modal gradation extends, and how it relates to grammatical gradability of the type studied in the extensive literature on degree expressions.

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Modality, expected utility, and hypothesis testing

Chung

Mascarenhas

2023

Synthese

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We introduce an expected-value theory of linguistic modality that makes reference to expected utility and a likelihood-based confirmation measure for deontics and epistemics, respectively. The account is a probabilistic semantics for deontics and epistemics, yet it proposes that deontics and epistemics share a common core modal semantics, as in traditional possible-worlds analysis of modality. We argue that this account is not only theoretically advantageous, but also has far-reaching empirical consequences. In particular, we predict modal versions of reasoning fallacies from the heuristics and biases literature. Additionally, we derive the modal semantics in an entirely transparent manner, as it is based on the compositional semantics of Korean modal expressions that are morphosyntactically decomposed into a conditional and an evaluative predicate.

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A conservative theory of gradable modality

Cited by 3 publications

References 20 publications

Graded Modality

Graded Modality

Graded Modality

Modality, expected utility, and hypothesis testing

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