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The indexical character of epistemic modality

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Abstract

We assume a central thesis about modal auxiliaries due to Angelika Kratzer, the modal base presupposition: natural language expressions that contain a modal component in their meaning, including all English modal auxiliaries and epistemic modal auxiliaries (EMA)s in particular, presuppose a modal base, a function that draws from context a relevant set of propositions which contribute to a premise-semantics for the modal. Accepting this thesis for EMAs leaves open (at least) the following two questions about the meaning of English EMAs like must and might: (i) What constraints, if any, are there on the character of the premise set for an EMA? And (ii) what is the nature of the relationship between premises and conclusion that is required for truth of the EMA statement? I argue for at least a partial answer to (i), with a hypothesis about constraints on the modal base for an EMA: EMAs, unlike some other types of modals, are indexical: They are anchored to an agent-in-a-situation whose doxastic state is currently under discussion in the context of utterance. Realized in a Kratzerian semantics, indexicality sheds new light on a number of outstanding puzzles, including the widely observed variability of anchoring of EMAs, the ways in which EMAs differ from so-called root modals, Yalcin’s (Mind 116:983–1026, 2007) puzzle (a version of Moore’s paradox for epistemic modals embedded under attitudes), how to explain the apparent weakness of necessity EMAs, and problems with second order belief and disagreement.

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Notes

  1. See Kratzer (2012) for an overview of the development of this theory. Cf. also Veltmann’s (1985) premise semantics.

  2. See the mereology of situations in Kratzer (1989), where situations are world-bound.

  3. I adopt Stalnaker’s (2008) constraints on Dox. He modifies Lewis’ (1979) characterization of this relation over centered worlds in ways that do not bear on the current analysis.

  4. I use ‘#’ to indicate that the example (or the marked part of it) is infelicitous in the context in which it is uttered, implicating that the expression is grammatical and might be felicitous in another context.

  5. For locatives, see Fillmore (1975), Hockett (1990) and Oshima’s (2006a, 2006b) “deictic perspective shift”. For shifted indexicals, Deal (2020) summarizes a large body of literature on many languages.

  6. Doron (1991), Sharvit (2008) and Eckardt (2015).

  7. Cipria and Roberts (2000) argue that events are a type of situation. I use event dRefs here because Partee (1984) offers independent motivation for tracking them across discourse and relates them to Reference Time.

  8. Where ⊕ is the join operator of Link (1983).

  9. There is a phenomenon much like FID, occurring in the complements of certain attitude verbs and licensing a shift in perspective, with some indexicals shifting accordingly. Abrusán (2021) calls this protagonist projection, and argues that it differs from FID in important respects. Protagonist projection is captured in (8) by the introduction of ©pred for the relevant verbs. I take it that FID is always and only introduced globally.

  10. Cf. see Potts’ (2007) analysis of the meaning of say in indirect discourse, where the content of the complement is something the speaker is committed to, a purported belief state. Hence, arguably say does denote an attitude, rather like the purported beliefs of ©CS. And it seems that according to has a content like that of say. Like say, according to may report characterizations of a counterfactual situation in which the reporting agent purportedly finds herself.

  11. From episode 8 of Season 1: “Mr. Monk and the Marathon Man”.

  12. Kratzer (2020) explains that the evidential domain of an ema is factual not in that all of the available evidence is true in the world in which the agent actually finds themself, but in that whatever the evidence, its source, and its reliability, this is replicated in all the worlds in the modal’s domain. And she is at pains to make clear that the evidential situation needn’t contain the actual things the agent has information about in that situation—in (12) it needn’t include the actual corpse—so that the available information pertaining to such an object may be limited—the detectives don’t have access to information about whether she was poisoned. But crucially, it includes all the relevant available evidence, noticed or not.

  13. This echoes the findings of Moss (2015), who argues that the QUD in a given context of utterance, a partition over worlds in the interlocutors’ Common Ground, plays an important role in domain restriction of the epistemic vocabulary she considers, and so ultimately in their truth conditional contributions, including explaining apparent non-commutativity of disjunctions containing epistemic vocabulary.

  14. One might further restrict the domain to only consider those propositions that the anchor knows, rather than just those that she believes to be true, as proposed by McCready (2008, 2010). I think this is too strong, as others have argued in the literature.

  15. See Hacking (1967), Egan et al. (2005), MacFarlane (2005), Stephenson (2007), von Fintel and Gillies (2007, 2011), inter alia.

  16. See Sharvit (2008), Eckardt (2015) for overviews and extensive illustrations.

  17. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer, who brought this contrast to my attention.

  18. Though see Dowell (2011) for discussion of a variety of other examples.

  19. An anonymous reviewer points out that similar examples involving telescoping also appear acceptable:

    1. (i)

      Every contestant worried about the future. He might be kicked off the show and sent home empty-handed. It would be intolerable.

    One might understand telescoping as a kind of zooming in on the arbitrary instance of the quantificational domain, in this case licensing the arbitrary ©worry to serve as anchor for might. But since I know of no fully satisfactory account of telescoping at this time, this is just an intuition.

  20. I suspect that epistemic modals generally do not take semantic tense, but always get their temporal interpretation indexically. But that does not preclude their “wearing” tense. Fǎlǎuş and Laca (2021) discuss cases where Romance epistemic modals bear past morphology, but there ‘past’ seems to only apply to the interpretation of the modal’s prejacent. They say, “Whatever the right analysis for these cases turns out to be, it seems clear that an appropriate context for the. . .Romance examples involving modals bearing imparfait morphology requires licensing by an implicit past attitude. If this is the case, the label “past temporal perspective” is misleading as applied to them: the temporal perspective is actually simultaneous (“present”), but it is simultaneous to a past attitude, as it is the case in overt sequence of tense contexts.” That is, the past-ness of the epistemic modal comes from the anchoring perspective, not from the tense it bears. Thanks to Paula Menéndez-Benito (p.c.) for pointing out their relevant work. Of course, many more languages need to be considered before one can generalize the claim about epistemic modals being tenseless. But insofar as epistemic modals are indexical in the sense defined here, that is what we would expect.

  21. It is clear that root modals do often bear a special relationship to the subject of the clause in which they occur. Whether this is direct (via control) or indirect (via raising) is controversial, though the latter view currently seems dominant. See the literature summarized in Portner (2009, section 4.3.2: 187ff).

  22. About which I have serious reservations; see Roberts (2018).

  23. (43) is Yalcin’s (8) with but substituted for his and, and the final raining elided. I take it that this is more natural sounding, and the change makes no difference to the logic of the examples.

  24. Rich Thomason (p.c. to Bill Harper, brought to my attention by Nate Charlow) noticed around 1975 that “conditionally entertaining that P is not conditionally entertaining that KP” (Rich’s characterization, p.c.), offering as an example If my wife were cheating on me, I wouldn’t know it, subsequently much cited in the literature.

  25. The problem has, of course, been discussed by others. For example, see Anand and Hacquard (2013). Space precludes comparing all the approaches that have been considered.

  26. Merriam-Webster (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entertain) offers this definition for entertain (definition 3a): “to keep, hold, or maintain in the mind”. And a direction to suppose is often followed by Then…

  27. So-called counterfactual conditionals in English themselves are only possibly counterfactual, as recognized at least since Karttunen and Peters (1979). This will be the case with suppose as well.

  28. In actual implementation, the agent is an individual concept, type <s,e>. I simplify for ease of exposition.

  29. See Portner (2007), Roberts (2018, 2022a, 2022b) for details, simplified here.

  30. Nate Charlow and Phil Kremer (p.c.) pointed out the importance of the reversed order examples, for which I am grateful.

  31. Note that the Diversity Condition of Condoravdi (2002)/the Disparity Principle of Werner (2003, 2006), requiring that the modal domain contains both worlds where the prejacent is true and those where it is false, also fail to hold in cases like (63): This condition only holds when the QUD is ‘whether ’ or some super-question thereof. But in such cases, Disparity/Diversity follows from the QUD, for these are the alternatives in the partition.

  32. Compare the present proposal with that of Mandelkern (2019c) on this point: His “guiding observation” is that “a claim of \( \left\lceil {{\hbox{Might p}}} \right\rceil \) is a proposal to make p compatible with the common ground, and to make this fact itself common ground.” This is what is typically asserted in uttering a declarative might p in a context where the QUD is ‘whether p’. But in Mandelkern’s formulation, the generalization is too broad: If the student in (63) had replied instead There might be three reds, Mordecai would have responded That’s right!, and neither he nor the student would have intended to suggest that the prejacent should be compatible with the common ground, with which it is in fact incompatible.

  33. An anonymous reviewer and Paula Menéndez-Benito (p.c.) point out that on the present account, “must can be expected to give rise to weakness implicatures relative to a shifted perspective” (PMB). I think that’s the right prediction: If the QUD is ‘what does Pascal know about p’ and the answer is ‘(according to Pascal) there must be two reds’, there is an inference that Pascal is not in a position to assert that p.

  34. A related reason one might hedge about the truth of the prejacent of an ema has to do with what’s at stake, a point emphasized by Stanley (2005) about knowledge generally. The formal Character of emas in Sect. 3 does not reflect the subtleties about credence that would be required to capture this distinction, but it should be kept in mind.

  35. See earlier arguments along similar lines due to Stone (1994), Murray (2014), Swanson (2015), Lassiter (2016), and Silk (2016). Though the data are rather delicate, I think these authors give good evidence for something like Support as a general constraint on the felicitous use of emas; and Mandelkern also offers convincing experimental results. Support can be taken to be a corollary of Palmer’s characterization of must above: a reflection of the anaphoric presupposition that there is a salient modal base f which yields the domain of the operator in the modal’s proffered content. This is a different account than that proposed by Mandelkern (2019b); unfortunately there isn’t space here to discuss his proposal in detail.

  36. The following elaborations on the scenario are not considered by von Fintel and Gillies (2021).

  37. Lassiter (2016, section 4.4) makes related arguments about examples like (67), though without assuming the character of must that supports this discussion here.

  38. An anonymous reviewer finds that another factor in the felicity of must claims is whether the truth of the prejacent is particularly contentious. Perhaps. It might be that in a contentious discussion it behaves the interlocutors to exercise greater precision or caution in drawing conclusions.

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Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Jefferson Barlew, Greg Kierstead, and Eric Snyder for discussions of this material over many months and their own stimulating exploration of related ideas; to Nate Charlow, Guillermo Del Pinal, Janice Dowell, Kai von Fintel, Hans-Martin Gärtner, Thony Gillies, Lelia Glass, Jack Hoeksma, Marcus Kneer, Phil Kremer, Dan Lassiter, Ernie LePore, Emar Maier, Friederike Moltmann, Carl Pollard, Jennifer Spenader, Rich Thomason, Judith Tonhauser, and Brandon Waldon for stimulating discussions and comments, and especially to anonymous reviewers for the journal Semantics and Pragmatics for tough and extremely useful comments on a much earlier draft, as well as to my reviewers and Paula Menéndez-Benito at L&P, whose help led to very substantial improvements. I am also grateful to audiences at the Rutgers University ErnieFest in 2014, the MASZAT group at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Institute of Sciences, ReDRAW’15 at the University of Groningen, the 2018 meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, a University of Toronto Philosophy Colloquium, the NY Philosophy of Language Workshop, the Philosophy of Language and Mind meeting in St. Andrews in August, 2019, and Cleo Condoravdi’s fall 2020 Stanford seminar. An earlier version of this paper was completed while I was a Senior Fellow in 2014–2015 at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, sponsored by Budapesti Közép-Európai Egyetem Alaptvány, and I am deeply grateful for their support, and for the assistance of OSU, without which I could not have accepted the fellowship. The theses promoted herein are the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of any of the other sponsoring organizations or individuals cited here. To my dismay, as this paper was being proofread I discovered Santorio (2010), which is relevant to the proposal herein. I will have to save for another occasion discussion of Santorio’s proposal for treating epistemic and doxastic modals as Kaplanian monsters.

Funding

Partial funding was received from a Targeted Investment in Excellence grant from The Ohio State University, from a Research Enhancement Grant from the OSU Colleges of the Arts and Sciences, and from NSF Grants #0952571 and #1452674, 2015–2018 to Beaver, Roberts, Simons and Tonhauser.

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    Craige Roberts

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Roberts, C. The indexical character of epistemic modality. Linguist and Philos 46, 1219–1267 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-023-09384-3

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