Might do better: Flexible relativism and the QUD

Abstract

The past decade has seen a protracted debate over the semantics of epistemic modals. According to contextualists, epistemic modals quantify over the possibilities compatible with some contextually determined group's information. Relativists often object that contextualism fails to do justice to the way we assess utterances containing epistemic modals for truth or falsity. However, recent empirical work seems to cast doubt on the relativist's claim, suggesting that ordinary speakers' judgments about epistemic modals are more closely in line with contextualism than relativism (Knobe & Yalcin 2014;Khoo 2015). This paper furthers the debate by reporting new empirical research revealing a previously overlooked dimension of speakers' truth-value judgments concerning epistemic modals. Our results show that these judgments vary systematically with the question under discussion in the conversational context in which the utterance is being assessed. We argue that this 'QUD effect' is difficult to explain if contextualism is true, but is readily explained by a suitably flexible form of relativism.

The Liar Without Relativism

“…Given that MacFarlane's elaboration of relativism vindicates the coherence of the notion, one might expect it to be a simple empirical matter whether any natural language expressions are assessment sensitive. Yet a number of complications surround gathering and interpreting relevant empirical data (see Beddor and Egan 2018;Katz and Salerno 2017;Khoo and Knobe 2018;Knobe and Yalcin 2014). Moreover, some have argued that relativism should be rejected even if it were to receive apparent empirical support.…”

Quasi Indexicals

“…Perhaps this would be the case if David and Naomi were described as interested in assessing the status of attitudes towards wealth in Beth's context. More empirical work on this point is needed, but some initial findings suggest that just these kinds of changes in the context of assessment do affect judgments about truth value assessments of epistemic modal claims (see Beddor & Egan 2017), so there is reason to be optimistic about the strategy considered here.…”

“…Nonetheless, at this stage, I think we are still justified in drawing this preliminary conclusion. 13 For discussion of the utility of distinguishing the assertoric content and compositional semantic value of a sentence, see Lewis 1980, Stanley 1997, Ninan 2010, Rabern 2012, 2017, Yalcin 2014 BASELINE SEMANTICS: s"Jim is rich"t c;w;g = 1 iff Jim's personal wealth at w is greater than g.…”

Endorsement and assertion

“…For support of these claims seeRoberts (2012) andBeddor and Egan (2018) Schaffer (2008). also appeals to the model in constructing a contrastivist knowledge norm.22 Generally, Roberts thinks there will only be a single immediate question under discussion at a time.…”