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Quinn Harr: Epistemic Modals, and Semantic Content

1115 Skinner Hall
Monday, September 15, 2014 - 3:30 PM to 4:30 PM

The proper treatment of epistemic modals is a vexed question. They are unlike other modals in apparently giving rise to faultless disagreement, being difficult to embed, embedding (when they do so) very selectively under attitude verbs, and out-scoping tense, aspect, negation, and strong quantifiers. In this paper, I show that they also resist counterfactuals, though not uniformly so. The non-uniform way in which these modals resist counterfactuals dovetails nicely with a number of accounts of epistemic modals recently developed to account for some of the embedding data above. These approaches, while maintaining a uniformly truth-conditional account for both epistemic modals and non-epistemic ones, secure the quantificational domain for the former in a distinctive way which leads directly in some cases to the predicted unacceptability of counterfactuals. However, while the counterfactual data align nicely with the predictions of these theories they do not do so perfectly. This fact suggests either that the correct explanation of the embedding data is not the same as that of the counterfactual data or that, if it is the same, it has yet to been given. I offer some suggestions for how a uniform explanation might look, if indeed one is to be in the offing.