Abstract
Invariantism about ‘might’ says that ‘might’ semantically expresses the same modal property in every context. This paper presents and defends a version of invariantism. According to it, ‘might’ semantically expresses the same weak modal property in every context. However, speakers who utter sentences containing ‘might’ typically assert propositions concerning stronger types of modality, including epistemic modality. This theory can explain the phenomena that motivate contextualist theories of epistemic uses of ‘might’, and can be defended from objections of the sort that relativists mount against contextualist theories.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Austin, J. L. (1975). In J. O. Urmson & M. Sbisa (Eds.), How to do things with words (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bach, K. (2001a). You don’t say? Synthese, 128, 15–44.
Bach, K. (2001b). Speaking loosely: Sentence nonliterality. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 25, 249–263.
Bach, K. (2005). Context ex Machina. In Z. G. Szabo (Ed.), Semantics versus pragmatics (pp. 14–42). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bach, K. (2011). Perspectives on possibilities: Contextualism, relativism, or what? In A. Egan & B. Weatherson (Eds.), Epistemic modality (pp. 19–59). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Braun, D. (2011). Implicating questions. Mind & Language, 26, 574–595.
Braun, D. (Forthcoming). Contextualism about ‘might’ and says-that ascriptions. Philosophical Studies.
Cappelen, H., & Hawthorne, J. (2009). Relativism and monadic truth. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cappelen, H., & Lepore, E. (2005). Insensitive semantics: A defense of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Cappelen, H., & Lepore, E. (2006). Replies. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 73, 469–492.
Dowell, J. (2010). Flexible contextualism about ‘ought’ and attitude-attributions. Talk delivered at the annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association.
Dowell, J. (2011). A flexible contextualist account of epistemic modals. Philosophers’ Imprint, 11(14), 1–25.
Drubig, H. B. (2001). On the syntactic form of epistemic modality. Retrived May 24, 2012, from http://www.sfb441.uni-tuebingen.de/b2/papers/DrubigModality.pdf.
Egan, Andy. (2007). Epistemic modals, relativism, and assertion. Philosophical Studies, 133, 1–22.
Egan, A., Hawthorne, J., & Weatherson, B. (2005). Epistemic modals in context. In G. Preyer & G. Peter (Eds.), Contextualism in philosophy (pp. 131–169). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Huddlestone, R., & Pullum, G. K. (Eds.). (2002). The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Humberstone, L., & Cappelen, H. (2006). Sufficiency and excess. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary, 80, 265–320.
Kratzer, A. (1977). What ‘must’ and ‘can’ must and can mean. Linguistics and Philosophy, 1, 337–355.
Kripke, S. (1979). A puzzle about belief. In A. Margalit (Ed.), Meaning and use (pp. 239–281). Dordrecht: Reidel.
Lasersohn, P. (2005). Context dependence, disagreement, and predicates of personal taste. Linguistics and Philosophy, 28, 643–686.
MacFarlane, J. (2010). Epistemic modals: relativism vs. cloudy contextualism. Handout for talk presented on April 16, 2010 at the Chambers Philosophy Conference on Epistemic Modals, University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Retrieved May 24, 2012, from http://johnmacfarlane.net/cloudy.pdf.
MacFarlane, J. (2011). Epistemic modals are assessment-sensitive. In A. Egan & B. Weatherson (Eds.), Epistemic modality (pp. 144–178). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nunberg, G. (1993). Indexicality and deixis. Linguistics and Philosophy, 16, 1–43.
Palmer, F. (2001). Mood and modality (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Papafragou, A. (2006). Epistemic modality and truth conditions. Lingua, 116, 1688–1702.
Portner, P. (2009). Modality. New York: Oxford University Press.
Price, H. (1983). Does ‘probably’ modify sense? Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 61, 396–408.
Ross, J., & Schroeder, M. (2010). Reversibility and disagreement. Retrieved 2010 from http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~jacobmro/ppr/Reversibility_and_Disagreement_Final.pdf.
Sennett, A. (2011, Summer). Ambiguity. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/ambiguity/.
Simons, M. (2007). Observations on embedding verbs, evidentiality, and presupposition. Lingua, 117, 1034–1056.
Soames, S. (2005). Why incomplete definite descriptions do not defeat Russell’s theory of descriptions. Teorema, 24, 7–30. (Reprinted in Philosophical essays, Vol. I, pp. 377–399, by S. Soames, Ed., 2009, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.)
Soames, S. (2009). Philosophical essays (Vol. I.) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Soames, S. (2010). Philosophy of language. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stanley, J., & Szabó, Z. (2000). On quantifier domain restriction. Mind and Language, 15, 391–434.
Stephenson, T. (2007). Judge dependence, epistemic modals, and predicates of personal taste. Linguistics and Philosophy, 30, 487–525.
Swanson, E. (2011). How not to theorize about the language of subjective uncertainty. In A. Egan & B. Weatherson (Eds.), Epistemic modality (pp. 249–269). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
von Fintel, K. (2003). Epistemic modals and conditionals revisited. Handout from talk given at University of Massachusetts, Amherst on December 12, 2003. Retrieved May 23, 2012, from http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2003-umass-epistemics.pdf.
von Fintel, K. (2006). Modality and language. In D. M. Borchert (Ed.), Encyclopedia of philosophy. Detroit: MacMillan Reference USA.
von Fintel, K., & Gillies, A. (2007). An opinionated guide to epistemic modality. In T. S. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Oxford studies in epistemology (Vol. 2, pp. 36–62). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
von Fintel, K., & Gillies, A. (2008). CIA leaks. Philosophical Review, 117, 77–98.
von Fintel, K., & Gillies, A. (2011). ‘Might’ made right. In A. Egan & B. Weatherson (Eds.), Epistemic modality (pp. 108–130). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wright, C. (2007). New age relativism and epistemic possibility: The question of evidence. Philosophical Issues, 17, 262–283.
Wright, C. (2008). Relativism about truth itself: Haphazard thoughts about the very idea. In M. Garcia-Carpintero & M. Kölbel (Eds.), Relativizing utterance truth (pp. 157–186). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Yalcin, S. (2007). Epistemic modals. Mind, 116, 983–1026.
Yalcin, S. (2011). Nonfactualism about epistemic modality. In A. Egan & B. Weatherson (Eds.), Epistemic modality (pp. 295–332). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zwicky, A. M., & Sadock, J. M. (1975). Ambiguity tests and how to fail them. In J. Kimball (Ed.), Syntax and semantics 4 (pp. 1–36). New York: Academic Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Braun, D. An invariantist theory of ‘might’ might be right. Linguist and Philos 35, 461–489 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-012-9124-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-012-9124-y