Epistemic Modals

This monograph focuses on modality in Spanish. It presents the theoretical approach to this category formulated by Bohumil Zavadil and, consequently, it analyses its possible application to Spanish. We concentrate on specific areas of the Spanish modal system where two modal meanings combine. Theoretical analyses are combined with corpus-based studies concentrating on the choice of mood or contextual interpretation of selected constructions. We veryfied that areas where two modal meanings meet are a natural part of the Spanish modal system and that the combination of modal meanings has consequences on the mood selection.

This study analyzes the functionality of reported speech marking in interpreter’s utterances in authentic ad-hoc-interpretated German-Turkish and German-Portuguese doctor-patient communication (Special attention is paid to the Turkish reported speechmarkers diyor ‘says/ is saying’ and –mIş, to two Portuguese markers (the verbum dicendi contar que ’to tell that’ and the subjunctor que ‘that’) as well as to German meinen ‘mean, reckon’). Whereas guides to medical interpreting recommend to avoid the marking of reported speech, in our data it is used frequently (especially in the Turkish data) and appears in the German-Turkish and the German-Portuguese data basically in the same situations, particulary in risk communication, communication about clinical findings, and medical interviews. It is argued that it is used as a connectivity procedure on the one hand, and as a procedure to modalize the utterance on the other. The marking of reported speech does not focus on the proposition as other connective procedures do, but rather focuses on the speech situation, i.e. the participants. Therefore, this connectivity procedure is evenmore basic than others. By relinking fragments of the propositional content to their source the interpreter modalizes the utterance in a specific way. The challenge for interpreter trainings is that the use of reported speech marking may facilitate or hamper the communicative exchange between doctor and patient. It should therefore be used consciously by interpreters.
Português:
Este estudo – elaborado no âmbito do projeto “Interpretação no Hospital” do Centro de Pesquisa sobre Multilingualismo na Universidade de Hamburgo - objetiva analisar as funções dos marcadores de reprodução de fala em enunciados de intérpretes de comunicações autênticas entre médicos alemães e pacientes turcos ou portugueses traduzidos por intérpretes não-profissionais. Atenção especial é dada para a análise dos marcadores diyor ‘diz/ está dizendo’ e –mIş em turco, contar que e o subjunctor que em português, assim como meinen ‘achar’ em alemão. Enquanto guias para a interpretação em contextos medicais recomendam evitar marcar a fala reproduzida como tal, nos dados por nós analisados os intérpretes marcam-na com freqüencia (especialmente nos dados em turco). Os marcadores dereprodução de fala são usados nos dados teuto-turcos e teuto-portugueses basicamentenas mesmas situações, especialmente na comunicação sobre riscos, resultados de análise médica e de anamnésia. Avança-se a hipótese que a marcação da reprodução de fala serve como procedimento de conectividade dum lado e como procedimento de modalização doutrolado, só que – a diferença de outros procedimentos conectivos a marcação da reprodução de fala não enfoca a proposição, mas sim a situação de fala, i.e. os participantes – sendo assim mais básico para a coesão do que outros procedimentos. Ligando fragmentos do conteúdo proposicional à sua fonte, o intérprete modaliza o enunciado de maneira específica. O desafio que enfrenta a formação de intérpretes para esta tarefa é que a marcação de reprodução de fala pode facilitar ou dificultar a comunicação entre médicos e pacientes. Por isso é necessário usá-la de maneira consciente.

The undergraduate thesis deals with the ways of expressing epistemic (extrinsic) modality in spoken English. In the light of knowledge gained from individual reference books it offers different views on modality in general and subsequently focuses only on epistemic modality. There are two main ways speakers use to express their commitment to the truth or likelihood of a proposition and these are: grammatical (modal verbs) and lexical (adverb phrase, finite clause). Each branch further examines individual means of realisation, so called ‘epistemic markers’. The second part of the thesis analyses 181 excerpts taken from the film Pride & Prejudice directed by Joe Wright in 2005. The following results of the analysis show that epistemic modality is relatively frequent phenomenon in spoken language (15% of sequences) considering its limited means of realization. The second research question proved that epistemic stance is usually expressed lexically (77%) thanks to its syntactic mobility. Finally, it was detected that the most frequent expression are ‘I think’ (21 cases), ‘must’ (14 cases) ‘I hope’ (11 cases), ‘perhaps’ (11 cases) and ‘I believe’ (9 cases), most of them being lexical. Generally, there is a tendency to express higher degree of certainty rather than lower.

Epistemic modals have peculiar logical features that are challenging to account for in a broadly classical framework. For instance, while a sentence of the form p ∧ ♦¬p ('p, but it might be that not p') appears to be a contradiction, ♦¬p does not entail ¬p, which would follow in classical logic. Likewise, the classical laws of distributivity and disjunctive syllogism fail for epistemic modals. Existing attempts to account for these facts generally either under-or over-correct. Some theories predict that p∧♦¬p, a so-called epistemic contradiction, is a contradiction only in an etiolated sense, under a notion of entailment that does not allow substitution of logical equivalents; these theories underpredict the infelicity of embedded epistemic contradictions. Other theories savage classical logic, eliminating not just rules that intuitively fail, like distributivity and disjunctive syllogism, but also rules like non-contradiction, excluded middle, De Morgan's laws, and disjunction introduction, which intuitively remain valid for epistemic modals. In this paper, we aim for a middle ground, developing a semantics and logic for epistemic modals that makes epistemic contradictions genuine contradictions and that invalidates distributivity and disjunctive syllogism but that otherwise preserves classical laws that intuitively remain valid. We start with an algebraic semantics, based on ortholattices instead of Boolean algebras, and then propose a more concrete possibility semantics, based on partial possibilities related by compatibility. Both semantics yield the same consequence relation, which we axiomatize. Then we show how to extend our semantics to explain parallel phenomena involving probabilities and conditionals. The goal throughout is to retain what is desirable about classical logic while accounting for the non-classicality of epistemic vocabulary.

Attention to the conversational role of alethic terms seems to dominate, and even sometimes exhaust, many contemporary analyses of the nature of truth. Yet, because truth plays a role in judgment and assertion regardless of whether alethic terms are expressly used, such analyses cannot be comprehensive or fully adequate. A more general analysis of the nature of truth is therefore required---one which continues to explain the significance of truth independently of the role alethic terms play in discourse. We undertake such an analysis in this paper; in particular, we start with certain elements from Kant and Frege, and develop a construct of truth as a normative modality of cognitive acts (e.g., thought, judgment, assertion). Using the various biconditional T-schemas to sanction the general passage from assertions to (equivalent) assertions of truth, we then suggest that an illocutionary analysis of truth can contribute to its locutionary analysis as well, including the analysis of diverse constructions involving alethic terms that have been largely overlooked in the philosophical literature. Finally, we briefly indicate the importance of distinguishing between alethic and epistemic modalities.

This thesis develops a threshold-based semantics for the Turkish indirect evidential marker that predicts unexpected discrepancies in its distribution. The marker's behavior in interrogatives, so-called interrogative flip, is shown in turn to follow from the structure of discourse, as formulated by models that incorporate speaker commitment. I first establish that the indirect evidential marks information for which a speaker's evidence is at best second-best, given general knowledge about the world. I then formalize this generalization in modal semantic terms and show that it explains the marker's canonical absence in reports of well-known historical fact, as well as its optional presence in evaluative and mirative expressions. After examining the account's predictions on the level of discourse, I discuss two corollaries: that evidential content in Turkish is not propositional, and that an at best second-best account brings to light anaphoric parallels between indirect evidentiality and the present perfect relative tense.

This thesis examines whether Expletive Negation (EN) in attitude contexts is indeed semantically vacuous and which are its licensing conditions. By examining the crosslinguistic distribution of EN, I show that EN is not dependent on the mood specification of the embedded clause contra what has been previously argued (e.g. Abels 2005, Espinal 2000, Yoon 2011) but rather it is only licensed in tensed clauses. I show that EN complements are selected by predicates that also select for questions. I present new asymmetries between EN and that complements: more specifically, I show that epistemic modals are not licensed in EN complements, an attitude with an EN-complement cannot function as a felicitous answer, matrix negation has different scope in EN and non-EN clauses and that EN can be used instead of an epistemic in counterfactuals. Based on these asymmetries and the previously established necessary condition for tense, I propose that EN is an epistemic modal. EN actually indicates that the doxastic alternatives of the attitude holder are equally probably and thus the semantics of EN complements are very similar to that of embedded questions. Even though the distributions of embedded questions and EN complements largely overlap and the two constructions can be changed without any difference in the meaning I demonstrate that their distribution is not identical and thus further investigation is necessary.

In the present study, samples of late Modern English scientific texts have been analysed to evaluate cases of epistemic modality as realised by modal verbs. The aim of this research was to detect if there exist variances in the way modals are used in historical texts from a gender perspective. For this, I have interrogated the Corpus History English Texts (1700-1900) which is part of The Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Texts, which contains history texts written by male and female authors. I have used the Coruña Corpus Tool for retrieval, although manual analyses have been carried out as well. Each of the occurrences found have been categorised according to their contextual meanings. The results obtained account for a high frequency on the usage of these modal verbs according to gender and the diverse pragmatic functions these modal verbs accomplish in the communicative process, such as mitigation and negative politeness. From a pragmatic perspective, epistemic modals have the potential to allow negotiation of meaning between writers and their audience among other functions.

Metaethical absolutism is the view that moral concepts have non-relative satisfaction conditions that are constant across judges and their particular beliefs, attitudes, and cultural embedding. If it is correct, there is an important sense in which parties of moral disputes are concerned to get the same things right, such that their disputes can be settled by the facts. If it is not correct, as various forms of relativism and non-cognitivism imply, such coordination of concerns will be limited.
      The most influential support for absolutism comes from an argument with two related premises. According to the first premise, moral thinking and moral discourse display a number of features that are characteristically found in paradigmatically absolutist domains, and only partly in uncontroversially non-absolutist domains. According to the second, the best way of making sense of these features is to assume that absolutism is correct.
      This paper defends the prospect of a non-ad hoc, non-absolutist, explanation of these "absolutist" features, thus calling into question the second premise. But instead of attempting to directly explain why the moral domain displays these features, it attends to how they are partially displayed by paradigmatically non-absolutists judgments about taste and likelihood. Based on this, it proposes independently motivated general accounts of attributions of agreement, disagreement, correctness and incorrectness that can explain both why absolutist domains display all "absolutist" features and why these non-absolutist domains display some. Based on these accounts, it provides preliminary reasons to think that these features of moral discourse can be given a non-absolutist explanation.

Are so-called "epistemico-modal" adverbs really modal when put in context ? Our answer is 'No'. In this functional analysis, we distinguish two uses of the French "modal" adverb 'certainement'. A (minority) epistemico-modal use, expressing full certainty, and a (dominant) evidential use expressing inference. We agree that the evidential use has an "modal-like" component, which we call "posture de certitude" and that we claim to be different from "real" epistemic modality defined as the evaluation by the speaker of the propositional content in terms of certainty or probability, which in the case of 'certainement' is said to be "weak" ('only' probability). For each value, typical contexts of appearance are listed with authentic examples. See also my study "Are ‘modal adverbs’ automatically modal markers? The case of French 'certainement': evidential versus epistemico-modal use" published earlier (but written after this one).

There is a common assumption in the semantics of modal auxiliaries in natural language; in utterances of MOD φ, where MOD is a modal and φ is the prejacent, context determines the particular flavor of modality expressed by the modal. Such is the standard contextualist semantics of Kratzer and related proposals. This winds up being a problem, because there is a significant class of modals which have constraints on the admissible modal flavor that are not traceable to context. For example, in MUST φ, subsentential properties of φ, like the aspectual class of the predicate in the prejacent, can affect the flavor of MUST. By encoding the above assumption into the semantics, such contextualist accounts fail to be able to explain, much less to predict, this pattern. Worse yet, attempts to exploit the resources of the theory in service of an explanation run afoul of important commitments of the view, like the hypothesis that modals have a uniform semantics. Given these circumstances, these data might seem like a justification for dispensing with the uniformity hypothesis. The present paper lays out the above problem in detail. Against the pessimistic view, I argue that the the contextualist account can in fact explain and predict these patterns while preserving the uniformity hypothesis. This requires adopting an amendment to the semantics of modals based on the work of Valentine Hacquard. Aside from maintaining the contextualist paradigm and preserving uniformity, the proposal also clarifies the role of context in the interpretation of modals. As it will turn out, the role of context ought to be circumscribed in its flavor-determining role for modals.

In the philosophical literature on the definition of lying, the analysis is generally restricted to cases of flat-out belief. This chapter considers the complex phenomenon of lies involving partial beliefs – beliefs ranging from mere uncertainty to absolute certainty. The first section analyses lies uttered while holding a graded belief in the falsity of the assertion, and presents a revised insincerity condition, requiring that the liar believes the assertion to be more likely to be false than true. The second section analyses assertions that express graded beliefs, exploring how mitigation and reinforcement can alter the insincerity conditions for lying. The last section considers the case of lies that attack certainty (knowledge-lies), understood as attempt to alter the hearer’s graded beliefs.

This is a study in the meaning of natural language probability operators, sentential operators such as probably and likely. We ask what sort of formal structure is required to model the logic and semantics of these operators. Along the way we investigate their deep connections to indicative conditionals and epistemic modals, probe their scalar structure, observe their sensitivity to contextually salient contrasts, and explore some of their scopal idiosyncrasies.

In this paper I investigate occurrences of epistemic modals such as must and might embedded under three classes of attitude verbs: (i) doxastic and doxastic-like verbs like believe, (ii) desiderative verbs like want, and (iii) emotive doxastic and dubitative verbs like fear, hope and doubt. The first class allows both necessity and possibility epistemic modals; the second class allows neither necessity not possibility epistemic modals; and finally, the third class allows possibility but not necessity epistemic modals. We begin our inquiry by reviewing Anand and Hacquard (2013)'s proposal. I present some challenges for the proposal and, in particular, for their proposal for class (iii). I show that the restrictions on embedded epistemic modals are similar to the restrictions on embedded V-to-C in German (Truckenbrodt (2006)) and argue that the two phenomena can be given similar explanations.

In a recent article Dylan Dodd has argued that anyone who holds that all knowledge is evidence must concede that we know next to nothing about the external world. The argument is intended to show that any infallibilist account of knowledge is committed to scepticism, and that anyone who identifies our evidence with the propositions we know is committed to infallibilism. I shall offer some reasons for thinking Dodd’s argument is unsound, and explain where his argument goes wrong.

This paper argues that we should assign certainty a central place in epistemology. While epistemic certainty played an important role in the history of epistemology, recent epistemology has tended to dismiss certainty as an unattainable ideal, focusing its attention on knowledge instead. I argue that this is a mistake. Attending to certainty attributions in the wild suggests that much of our everyday knowledge qualifies, in appropriate contexts, as certain. After developing a semantics for certainty ascriptions, I put certainty to explanatory work. Specifically, I argue that by taking certainty as our central epistemic notion, we can shed light on a variety of important topics, including evidence and evidential probability, epistemic modals, and the normative constraints on credence and assertion.

In the philosophical debate on lying, there has generally been agreement that either the speaker believes that his statement is false, or he believes that his statement is true. This article challenges this assumption, and argues that lying is a scalar phenomenon that allows for a number of intermediate cases – the most obvious being cases of uncertainty. The first section shows that lying can involve beliefs about graded truth values (fuzzy lies) and graded beliefs (graded-belief lies). It puts forward a new definition to deal with these scalar parameters, that requires that the speaker asserts what he believes more likely to be false than true. The second section shows that statements are scalar in the same way beliefs are, and accounts for a further element of scalarity, illocutionary force.

This is a long-anticipated collection of ten essays on epistemic modality by leading thinkers of the field, edited and introduced by Andy Egan and Brian Weatherson. Most of the papers published here give detailed accounts of the semantics and pragmatics of plain epistemically modalized sentences such as (1) Mary might be in Chicago, and so I will focus on this aspect of the volume, summarizing the remaining papers in my concluding remarks.

According to Kratzer's influential account (1981, 1991, 2012), epistemic "must" and "might" involve quantification over domains of possibilities determined by a modal base and an ordering source. Recently, this account has been challenged by invoking contexts of `epistemic tension': i.e., cases in which an assertion that "must p" is conjoined with the possibility that "not p", and cases in which speakers try to downplay a previous assertion that "must p", after finding out that "not p". Epistemic tensions have been invoked from two directions. Von Fintel and Gillies (2010) propose a return to a simpler modal logic-inspired account: "must" and "might" still involve universal and existential quantification, but the domains of possibilities are determined solely by realistic modal bases. In contrast, Lassiter (2016), following Swanson (2006, 2011), proposes a more revisionary account which treats "must" and "might" as probabilistic operators. In this paper, we present a series of experiments to obtain reliable data on the degree of acceptability of various contexts of epistemic tension. Our experiments include novel variations that, we argue, are required to make progress in this debate. We show that restricted quantificational accounts  fit the overall pattern of results better than either of their recent competitors. In addition, our results help us identify the key components of restricted quantificational accounts, and on that basis propose some refinements and general constraints that should be satisfied by any account of the modal auxiliaries.

In the article the structure of the negative clauses in Czech has been iscussed with respect to different types of clauses. We started from the typological observations conceming the possible means of expressing negation in the world languages as weil as their different structural.
Mostly,the negation is expressed by a bound morpheme (e.g. prefix or suffix), a negative auxiliary, a clitic like a head or an adverb. The most prominent negated sentences in Czech tumed out to be those in which a lexical independent functional projection with Neg as a head is assurned. Furthermore, some universal and specific properties of sentential negation as pposed to those of constituent negation were discussed. In the subsequent chapters, a closer look was taken at the negation related phenomena, namely Genitive of negation and negative pronouns (negative concord).

One crucial result of this article was that sentential negation must be located in the vicinity of the Accusative case checker, i.e. in some position above vP. The im of the subsequent section was to establish the precise position of negation in the clause. Doing so we established crucial differences between modal
and auxiliary verbs assuming that modal constructions are best analyzed as biclausal, consequently the negation occuring in the matrix or the complement clause has the properties of sentential negation. Finally, the last section focused on the
question of whether there is a NegP in Czech. The result of our investigation is the proposal that sentence negation is a proclitic heading of its own functional projection NegP.

We often claim to know what might be-or probably is-the case. Modal knowledge along these lines creates a puzzle for information-sensitive semantics for epistemic modals. This paper develops a solution. We start with the idea that knowledge requires safe belief: a belief amounts to knowledge only if it could not easily have been held falsely. We then develop an interpretation of the modal operator in safety ("could have") that allows it to non-trivially embed information-sensitive contents. The resulting theory avoids various paradoxes that arise from other accounts of modal knowledge. It also delivers plausible predictions about modal Gettier cases.

What does 'might' mean? One hypothesis is that 'It might be raining' is essentially an avowal of ignorance like 'For all I know, it's raining'. But it turns out these two constructions embed in different ways—in particular as parts of larger constructions like Wittgenstein (1953)'s 'It might be raining and it's not' and Moorean sentences like 'It's raining and for all I know, it's not' (Moore, 1942). A variety of approaches have been developed to account for those differences. All approaches agree that both Moore sentences and Wittgenstein sentences are classically consistent. In this paper I argue against this consensus. I adduce a variety of data which I argue can best be accounted for if we treat Wittgenstein sentences as being classically inconsistent. This creates a puzzle, since there is decisive reason to think that Might p is consistent with Not p. How can it also be that Might p and not p and Not p and might p are inconsistent? To make sense of this situation, I propose a new theory of epistemic modals which aims to account for their subtle embedding behavior and shed new light on the dynamics of information in natural language.

This paper examines the syntax-semantics of expletive negation  in Modern and Classical Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Russian and Hebrew attitude complements. It shows that, contrary to what is standardly assumed, expletive negation is not necessarily licensed in Subjunctive complements. It is licensed by predicates allowing for more than one live doxastic alternative, it scopes above Tense, and it is in complementary distribution with epistemic modals. Based on novel data I show that expletive negation is not semantically vacuous; I propose that it is a weak epistemic modal that marks the contextually provided, ordered in terms of likelihood alternatives as equally likely.

Epistemic modal operators give rise to something very like, but also very unlike, Moore's paradox. I set out the puzzling phenomena, explain why a standard relational semantics for these operators cannot handle them, and recommend an alternative semantics. A pragmatics appropriate to the semantics is developed and interactions between the semantics, the pragmatics, and the definition of consequence are investigated. The semantics is then extended to probability operators. Some problems and prospects for probabilistic representations of content and context are explored.

Lewis thought concessive knowledge attributions (e.g., ‘I know that Harry is a zebra, but it might be that he’s just a cleverly disguised mule’) caused serious trouble for fallibilists. As he saw it, CKAs are overt statements of the fallibilist view and they are contradictory. Dougherty and Rysiew have argued that CKAs are pragmatically defective rather than semantically defective. Stanley thinks that their pragmatic response to Lewis fails, but the fallibilist cause is not lost because Lewis was wrong about the commitments of fallibilism. There are problems with Dougherty and Rysiew’s response to Stanley and there are problems with Stanley’s response to Lewis. I’ll offer a defense of fallibilism of my own and show that fallibilists needn’t worry about CKAs.

A dynamic semantics for epistemically modalized sentences is an attractive alternative to the orthodox view that our best theory of meaning ascribes to such sentences truth-conditions relative to what is known. I demonstrate that a dynamic story about "might" and "must" offers elegant explanations of a range of puzzling observations about epistemic modals. The first part of the story provides a unifying treatment of disputes about epistemic modality and disputes about matters of fact while at the same time avoiding relativism or an overly weak pragmatics. The second part of the story extends what has been said to cover some further relevant data, including retraction, the interaction between epistemic modality and tense, and embeddings of epistemically modalized sentences under attitude verbs. A comparison between the suggestion made in this article and current versions of the orthodoxy is provided.

This corpus study investigates how children figure out that functional modals like must can express various flavors of modality. We examine how modality is expressed in speech to and by children, and find that the way speakers use modals may obscure their polysemy. Yet, children eventually figure it out. Our results suggest that some do before age 3. We show that while root and epistemic flavors are not equally well-represented in the input, there are robust correlations between flavor and aspect, which learners could exploit to discover modal polysemy.

Suppose I tell you "Sobel must be in his office". There are (at least) two distinct propositions I could be aiming to communicate. First, I could be remarking on his commitments, communicating, roughly, that every action open to him compatible with meeting those commitments locates him in his office. But, second, I could be remarking on what follows from the information available to me, roughly, that my information entails that he's in his office. A contextualist about modals holds that which proposition is expressed by a sentence containing a modal expression like "must" is a function of the context of utterance. A contextualist about modals in their epistemic use-illustrated by the second reading of my utterance-holds that the proposition expressed by such a use is likewise a function of the context of utterance. The canonical view of modal expressions in English, due primarily to Angelika Kratzer, is contextualist in this sense. The core idea is that necessity modals function like universal, possibility modals like existential, quantifiers over possibilities. In the case of epistemic modals, quantificational domains are restricted to worlds compatible with some body of information. Which body that is is determined by context.

Epistemic modals are a prominent topic in the literature on natural language semantics, with wide-ranging implications for issues in philosophy of language and philosophical logic. Considerations about the role that epistemic "might" and "must" play in discourse and reasoning have led to the development of several important alternatives to classical possible worlds semantics for natural language modal expressions. This is an opinionated overview of what I take to be some of the most exciting issues and developments in the field.

We often claim to know what might be-or probably is-the case. Modal knowledge along these lines creates a puzzle for information-sensitive semantics for epistemic modals. This paper develops a solution. We start with the idea that knowledge requires safe belief: a belief amounts to knowledge only if it could not easily have been held falsely. We then develop an interpretation of the modal operator in safety ("could have") that allows it to non-trivially embed information-sensitive contents. The resulting theory avoids various paradoxes that arise from other accounts of modal knowledge. It also delivers plausible predictions about modal Gettier cases.

Contextualism is the view that the extension of perspectival claims (involving e.g. predicates of personal taste or epistemic modals) depends on the context of utterance. Relativism is the view that the extension of perspectival claims depends on the context of assessment. Both views make concrete, empirically testable predictions about how such claims are used by ordinary English language speakers. This chapter surveys some of the recent empirical literature on the topic and presents four new experiments (total N=724). Consistent with contextualism and inconsistent with relativism, the results suggest that the extension of perspectival claims depends on the context of utterance, not the context of assessment.

I present a puzzle about belief and credence, which takes the form of three independently supported views that are mutually inconsistent. The first is the view that S has a modal belief that p (e.g., S believes that probably-p) if and only if S has a corresponding credence that p. The second is the view that S believes that p only if S has some credence that p. The third is the view that, possibly, S believes that p without a modal belief that p. [Word Count: 85]

An examination of conditionals in di¤erent languages leads to a distinction
of three types of conditionals instead of the usual two (indicative and subjunctive).
The three types can be explained by the degree of acceptance or
as-if acceptance of the truth of the antecedent. The labels 'subjunctive' and
'indicative' are shown to be inadequate. So-called indicative conditionals
comprise two classes, the very frequent uncertain-fact conditionals and the
quite rare accepted-fact conditionals. Uncertain-fact conditionals may have
a time shift in contemporary English and the future subjunctive in Portuguese
(though not all of them do). Moreover, paraphrases of 'if' with 'in
case' or 'supposing' are usually possible with approximately the same meaning.
Accepted-fact conditionals never have these features.

We address flexible embedded mood patterns, i.e. cases where (a) the same type of verb selects indicative in one language but prefers subjunctive in another, or (b) both moods may be allowed in a single language. We focus on emotive predicates as an illustration of our approach. Emotive predicates allow subjunctive and indicative (with preference for the former) in Italian. Such flexible patterns have not been discussed much in the literature because they are problematic for existing theories which predict the facts of one language but not the other. We propose that the correct account of embedded mood choice is sensitive to both what the embedding predicate asserts and what it presupposes. We argue that mood morphemes have definedness conditions that make them sensitive to aspects of the (non)veridicality of the embedding predicate, and implement an optimality theoretic account that captures opposing tendencies in Greek and Italian.

Epistemic modality concerns what is possible given a body of knowledge or evidence. Cases involving epistemic modals, present an interesting semantic challenge: in order to give a semantic treatment of epistemic modals, we must explain how informational states figure in the semantic representation of these terms. According to John MacFarlane's (2011, 2014) view – Assessor Relativism – epistemic modal claims are assessment-sensitive in that their truth depends on what is known by the assessor at the time he or she assesses the claim. Hence, truth for epistemic modal claims varies with the context of assessment. Critics of MacFarlane's approach, such as Anthony Gillies and Kai von Fintel (2008) point to so called " ignorant assessor cases, " ones in which the assessor knows less than the speaker. They claim that such cases pose a serious problem for Assessment Relativism. I argue, however, that these cases do not uncover a flaw in the assessment relativist's semantics. The apparent problems only seem to arise because the authors have not given adequate attention to the epistemic details of the cases. In making my argument, I present a larger methodological point about the role of epistemic data in semantic theory construction. I claim that, it is often difficult to distinguish the boundary between semantics and epistemology when discussing epistemic modals. As a result, linguists and philosophers of language sometimes fail distinguish between epistemic intuitions that are directly relevant to the semantics and those that are indirectly relevant. I conclude that we do not have to complicate the semantics of epistemic modals in order to accommodate epistemic data such as intuitions about epistemic warrant.

Many epistemologists call themselves ‘fallibilists’. But many philosophers of language hold that the meaning of epistemic usages of ‘possible’ ensures a close knowledge-(epistemic) possibility link (KPL): a subject’s utterance of ‘it’s possible that not-p’ is true only if the subject does not know that p. This seems to suggest that whatever the core insight behind fallibilism is, it can’t be that a subject could have knowledge which is, for them, possibly false. I argue that, on the contrary, subjects can have such possibly false knowledge. My ultimate aim, then, is to vindicate a very robust form of fallibilism. Uniquely, however, the account I offer does this while also allowing that concessive knowledge attributions – sentences of the form “I know that p, but it’s possible that not-p” – are not only infelicitous but actually false whenever uttered. The account predicts this result without conceding KPL. I argue that my account has the resources to explain some related cases for which the KPL account yields the wrong predictions. Taken as a whole, the linguistic data not only do not support the proposal that subjects cannot have possibly false knowledge, but indeed positively favor the proposal that they can.

An examination of conditionals in di¤erent languages leads to a distinction of three types of conditionals instead of the usual two (indicative and subjunctive). The three types can be explained by the degree of acceptance or as-if acceptance of the truth of the antecedent. The labels subjunctive and indicative are shown to be inadequate. So-called indicative conditionals comprise two classes, the very frequent uncertain-fact conditionals and the quite rare accepted-fact conditionals. Uncertain-fact conditionals may have a time shift in contemporary English and the future subjunctive in Portuguese (though not all of them do). Moreover, paraphrases of if with in case or supposing are usually possible with approximately the same meaning. Accepted-fact conditionals never have these features.

011014/> O n Kratzer's canonical account, modal expressions (like 'might ' and 'must') are represented semantically as quantifiers over possibilities. Such expressions are themselves neutral; they make a single contribution to determining the propositions expressed across a wide range of uses. What modulates the modality of the proposition expressed -as bouletic, epistemic, deontic, etc. -is context. This ain't the canon for nothing. Its power lies in its ability to figure in a simple and highly unified explanation of a fairly wide range of language use. Recently, though, the canon's neat story has come under attack. The challenge cases involve the epistemic use of a modal sentence for which no single resolution of the contextual parameter appears capable of accommodating all our intuitions. 2 According to the revisionists, such cases show that the canonical story needs to be amended in some way that makes multiple bodies of information relevant to the assessment of such statements.

The present paper has two goals. The simpler one is to weaken one of John MacFarlane's main motivations behind semantic relativism. The second, but more fundamental aim is to show that there are fundamental similarities between the aforementioned two philosophical debates. Such is the similarity between these two debates, that one can easily take almost any argument from the former debate, change some terms, adapt the examples, and end up with an argument relevant to the latter. Actually, that is what I plan to do in the second half of the paper: take a well known argument against moral luck, and turn it into an argument against relativism.

Seth Yalcin has pointed out some puzzling facts about the behaviour of epistemic modals in certain embedded contexts. For example, conditionals that begin 'If it is raining and it might not be raining, …' sound unacceptable, unlike conditionals that begin 'If it is raining and I don't know it, …'. These facts pose a prima facie problem for an orthodox treatment of epistemic modals as expressing propositions about the knowledge of some contextually specified individual or group. This paper develops an explanation of the puzzling facts about embedding within an orthodox framework.