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    Relativism about epistemic modals holds that propositions... — Carmelics
    Home/Philosophy of Language
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    Relativism about epistemic modals holds that propositions can differ in truth-value relative to contexts of assessment in addition to worlds and possibly times.

    Modality & PossibilityPhilosophy of Language
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.The appearance of propositions varying in truth-value depending on context is taken by the relativist to reflect reality.
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    • 2.Contexts of assessment are the contexts in which a proposition is being considered, distinct from contexts of utterance.
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    • 3.Eavesdropping cases—where one party overhears an utterance made without access to the hearer's evidence—generate the same intuitions without requiring different times of assessment.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Contextualist accounts (DeRose, Stanley) explain epistemic modal variation by indexing 'might' to the relevant knowledge state of the utterer's context.
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    • 2.If contextualism fully captures eavesdropping intuitions by shifting the contextually salient epistemic standard, positing contexts of assessment is ontologically superfluous.
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    • 3.MacFarlane's relativism violates the norm that truth-bearers have stable truth conditions, undermining compositionality in semantic theory.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Expressivists (Gibbard, Yalcin) argue that epistemic modals do not express propositions with truth conditions but rather update information states.
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    • 2.If 'might p' is not proposition-expressing, the relativist framework of assessment-relative truth values lacks a proper truth-apt object to be relativized.
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    • 3.Yalcin's informational semantics explains the logical behavior of epistemic modals—including embedding under 'suppose'—without invoking assessment-relative truth.
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    Topics

    Philosophy of LanguageModality & Possibility

    Connections

    1 topic

    Truth & Knowledge1 linked

    Related

    Contexts of assessment are the contexts in which a proposition is being consider...Contextualist accounts (DeRose, Stanley) explain epistemic modal variation by in...Eavesdropping cases—where one party overhears an utterance made without access t...Expressivists (Gibbard, Yalcin) argue that epistemic modals do not express propo...
    +5 moreShow less
    If 'might p' is not proposition-expressing, the relativist framework of assessme...If contextualism fully captures eavesdropping intuitions by shifting the context...MacFarlane's relativism violates the norm that truth-bearers have stable truth c...The appearance of propositions varying in truth-value depending on context is ta...Yalcin's informational semantics explains the logical behavior of epistemic moda...

    Similar

    Propositions expressed by epistemic modal sentences can vary in truth-...90%If contextualism about epistemic modals is correct, then the semantics...83%De re modal assertions about an object are semantically equivalent to ...83%A purely contextualist treatment of epistemic modals is insufficient t...82%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: meaning
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    But this is puzzling. It is not puzzling that the sentence “The murderer might have been on campus at midnight” could be true when uttered in the first context but false when uttered in the second context; that fact could be accommodated by any number of contextualist treatments of epistemic modals, which would dissolve the puzzle by saying that the sentence expresses different propositions relative to the two contexts. The puzzle is that the truth of the second sentence seems to imply that the
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit