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. EARLY ACCESS
Highlights
According to a traditional contextualist semantics, the truth-values of sentences containing epistemic modals are fixed by the context of utterance and the world of evaluation
Proportion of responses by condition in Experiment 1. Two aspects of these results are worth highlighting. They suggest that assessments of the truth-values of utterances containing epistemic modals are sensitive to the question under discussion (QUD) in the context of assessment — as predicted by flexible relativism supplemented with the QUD Constraint
A higher percentage of participants (59%) selected (a) (No, it’s not) in the QUD-PREJACENT condition than in the QUD-COMPETENCE condition (33%). (See Figure 2.) The difference between the conditions was found to be highly significant, χ2(1, N = 120) = 8.23, p = .004. These results provide further evidence of a QUD effect: truth-value judgments about bare’ epistemic possibility claim (BEP) are sensitive to the QUD of the conversational context in which the utterance is being assessed
Summary
According to a traditional contextualist semantics, the truth-values of sentences containing epistemic modals are fixed by the context of utterance and the world of evaluation. In recent years tradition has come under fire: a number of authors have argued that it does not do justice to the conditions under which we assess such modals for truth and falsity Many of these authors advocate replacing contextualism with a relativist semantics, according to which the truth-values of sentences containing. Bob Beddor and Andy Egan epistemic modals depend on a context of assessment (Egan et al 2005; Egan 2007; Stephenson 2007a,b; MacFarlane 2011, 2014) While this relativist challenge has generated much discussion, only recently have researchers begun empirically testing the predictions of contextualism and relativism. Standard versions of contextualism have a much harder time accounting for the data
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