Semantic expressivism for epistemic modals
Linguistics and Philosophy 44 (2):475-511 (2021)
Abstract
Expressivists about epistemic modals deny that ‘Jane might be late’ canonically serves to express the speaker’s acceptance of a certain propositional content. Instead, they hold that it expresses a lack of acceptance. Prominent expressivists embrace pragmatic expressivism: the doxastic property expressed by a declarative is not helpfully identified with that sentence’s compositional semantic value. Against this, we defend semantic expressivism about epistemic modals: the semantic value of a declarative from this domain is the property of doxastic attitudes it canonically serves to express. In support, we synthesize data from the critical literature on expressivism—largely reflecting interactions between modals and disjunctions—and present a semantic expressivism that readily predicts the data. This contrasts with salient competitors, including: pragmatic expressivism based on domain semantics or dynamic semantics; semantic expressivism à la Moss [2015]; and the bounded relational semantics of Mandelkern [2019].Author Profiles
DOI
10.1007/s10988-020-09295-7
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Citations of this work
A strictly stronger relative must.Christopher Gauker - 2021 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 10 (2):82-89.
The restrictor view, without covert modals.Ivano Ciardelli - 2022 - Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (2):293-320.
References found in this work
Assessment Sensitivity: Relative Truth and its Applications.John Gordon MacFarlane - 2014 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases.Irene Heim - 1982 - Dissertation, Umass Amherst