Thanks to everyone for sharing their intuitions about the cases in my previous post. Here I’m going to back up and say something about my interest in the cases. Among linguists, the canonical view about modal expressions like “might”, “may” and “must” is that they are quantifiers over possibilities where the domains of quantification are contextually restricted. The view is an extremely powerful one; if correct, it provides a simple, highly unified explanation of a wide variety of language use. Recently, the canon’s neat story has come under attack on two fronts, in its treatment of bare epistemic modals (BEMs) and bare normative modals (BNMs). (A bare modal statement is a modal statement that doesn’t contain a restrictor phrase like “in view of my evidence” or “in view of what the law requires”.) I’ve got a manuscript defending a general, flexible contextualist account of bare modal statements and an application of that account to BEMs. (Here: http://www.unl.edu/philosop/people/faculty/dowell/dowell.shtml) Now I’m working on defending an application of that account to BNMs. (NB: My apologies in advance; this post is both long and oversimplified.)
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