Dynamic ‘might’ and correct belief

Abstract

Synopsis: Veltman's test semantics and developments thereof reject the canon about semantic contents and attitude ascriptions in favor of dynamic alternatives. 1 According to these theories the semantic content of a sentence is not a proposition, but a context change potential (CCP). Similarly, beliefs are not taken to be relations between agents and propositions, but agents and CCPs. These deviations from the canon come at the cost of an elegant explanation about the correctness of belief. Standardly, it is taken that the content of a belief is correct just in case the content of that belief is true. The proponent of the test semantics cannot appeal to this explanation since they hold that certain contents, namely epistemically modalized contents, do not express propositions, and are neither true nor false. Willer (2013) concerns how the test semantics can be marshalled to solve inter alia puzzles of modal disagreement. Crucial to Willer's account is the proposal of a correctness condition which I call evidential correctness. According to evidential correctness, the content of a belief is correct just in case someone with the believing agent's evidence would not be committed to factual error. The present paper argues that evidential correctness does not yield the proper correctness judgments for interlocutors in several common instances of modal disagreement. It further argues that evidential correctness concerns a different kind of correctness than the kind operative in modal disagreements. Since correctness judgments are what motivate the claim that modal disagreements are genuine disagreements, I take these objections to be significant. I subsequently consider two potential alternatives: weak correctness and strong correctness but conclude that each suffers from substantial problems. I then provide my own novel correctness conditions for belief contents within a dynamic framework. I argue that there are, in fact, two conditions for correctness of content that ought to be considered when operating within the test semantics. The first, locative correctness, applies only to contents which locate the believing agent in some subset of the space of possibility by entailing some contingent proposition. The second, informational correctness applies to contents that do not not locate the believing agent. Such content includes, most notably, epistemically modalized content. After motivating this distinction, I * Forthcoming in Inquiry: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.1 The test semantics is introduced in Veltman (1996). See Groenendijk and Stokhof (1991a), Stokhof (1991b), andvan der Does et al. (1997) among many, many others for further developments.1 demonstrate how it yields the requisite correctness judgments on the part of disagreeing agents, and avoids the problems of the previously considered views.14 Must φ = def ¬Might ¬φ. On such an interpretation, Must is strong. While there are reasons to reject the strength of English "must" (see Karttunen (1972)), many working in the test semantics take "must"...