I am concerned with epistemic possibility expressions (EPEs) such as “It might be raining.” Much of the discussion of EPEs has concerned the fact that a given EPE can seem true in one context and false in another. Motivated by this data, contextualists have argued that modal expressions are sensitive to information at a
context of use. Contextualist analyses encounter problems when it comes to
disagreements centered on EPEs. Relativists such as John MacFarlane argue that epistemic modals are sen…
Read moreI am concerned with epistemic possibility expressions (EPEs) such as “It might be raining.” Much of the discussion of EPEs has concerned the fact that a given EPE can seem true in one context and false in another. Motivated by this data, contextualists have argued that modal expressions are sensitive to information at a
context of use. Contextualist analyses encounter problems when it comes to
disagreements centered on EPEs. Relativists such as John MacFarlane argue that epistemic modals are sensitive to information available to an assessor at a circumstance of evaluation. I side with a relativistic account of epistemic possibility, on which the truth conditions of EPEs depend not only on a context of use but also as on a context of assessment. The stipulation of contexts of assessments explains why third parties can judge an interlocutor’s utterance false, and why the interlocutor will retract her previous utterance. However, judgements of falsity and retraction seem to be absent in future-oriented EPEs such as “It might rain tomorrow.” I propose an mendment to John MacFarlane’s semantics that better models this quirk of epistemic possibility expressions.
