For a Dynamic Semantics of Necessity Deontic Modals

Abstract

Traditional approaches in deontic logic have focused on the so-called reportative reading of obligation sentences, by providing truth-functional semantics based on a primitive ideality order between possible worlds. Those approaches, however, do not take into account that, in natural language, obligation sentences primarily carry a prescriptive effect. The paper focuses precisely on that prescriptive character, and shows that the reportative reading can be derived from the prescriptive one. A dynamic, non truth-functional semantics for necessity deontic modals is developed, in which the ideality relations among possible worlds can be updated. Finally, it is proven that the semantics solves several of the classic deontic paradoxes.