Abstract
Despite its somewhat marginal occurrence, unattainability has been acknowledged as a genuine problematic element for the semantic analysis of modal constructions, particularly for those expressing desires (Heim in J Semant 9(3):183–221, 1992; Portner in Nat Lang Semant 5(2):167–211, 1997). However, considerably less attention has been given to unattainable duties. In this article, I suggest that just as worlds that are deemed desirable are not necessarily linked to worlds considered candidates for actuality, some circumstantial arrangements allow for obligational expressions the semantics of which evoke worlds that are deemed obligatory yet unattainable. As I will show, a careful examination of unattainable duties constructions reveals some unexplored semantic aspects of obligational ascriptions that are particularly relevant for the development of both X-marking and modal-tense interaction theories. This article provides a philosophical and linguistic account of the meaning and use of such constructions.
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Notes
As we shall see, the authors have preferred to refer to this as ‘X-morphology’, and I will follow their terminological proposal once I sketch the basic elements of their latest contribution (see Sect. 3). For now, the reader should be aware that the desires denoted in (3) are actual, not counterfactual.
The precision of such a diagnosis is of course a matter of debate. What seems undeniable is that the attempt to ‘domesticate’ UDeC\(_\text {want}\) by means of presuppositional constraints that evoke some notion of attainability contravenes the empirical fact that speakers do, on occasions, say things like ‘I want this weekend to last forever’. In effect, Heim considered such an example to be a ‘loose end’ (1992: 200) that raise ‘subtle[r] doubts’ on doxastic analyses of desire predicates (1992: 202). Portner, on the other hand, suggests that a modification of the doxastic background, to incorporate belief-like states more akin to a ‘hypothetical contemplation’, would be in place (1997: 179). As far as I know, this remains a pending task for semanticists.
I have modified the statement to a third person subject, so as to align the examples throughout the article. As far as I can see, nothing hinges on this modification.
Of course, not all double-promise situations are symmetrical. One can easily conceive of situations in which one promise is more important than the other. Example (1) was built under the (now explicit) symmetry assumption.
Philosophers tend to illustrate an all things considered statement with English ought to. This is not an unproblematic choice for linguists. I will not address this issue in this paper (which is not about English modals) and simply build examples with the other two lexical variants: have to and must.
Horty’s original formulation of this question varies considerably from the one offered above: “how do we define a consequence relation determining whether a particular all things considered ought of the form O(B/A) follows from a context of prima facie oughts?” (2003: 561). In Horty’s notation, O(B/A) represents an all things considered duty to B under the circumstances A. Since I have assumed that the circumstances A and the context of binding prima facie duties are contextually salient in the Kratzerian conversational background, I am also (perhaps over) simplifying the question as to what determines that an all things considered duty holds under a given CB. It is an interesting question what is at stake when a semanticist of natural language calibrates these interacting elements under a formal notation. The discussion here will, however, remain conceptual.
The notion that Horty uses at this point is deliberative, which in Bernard Williams’ original sense opposes moral (see Horty, 2003: 588 and references therein). I have opted for resolutive here, given the use of deliberative (as opposed to objective) in recent literature (see Cariani et al., 2013 and references therein). As far as I can see, the aspect of the modalities that these pairs of oppositions intend to illuminate might not fully coincide, and hence neither the original sense of the notions involved. That said, it is of course a valid question whether what I will opposed to resolutive (namely, descriptive) has any relevant connection to objective. The connection, if there is one, might be of interest.
An anonymous reviewer has pointed out that (11) is ambiguous, one reading meaning ‘younger than 19’ and the other meaning something plainly contradictory. As far as I can see, should is unacceptable in both readings.
Needless to say, the ‘standard’ semantics of X-morphemes can vary considerably from language to language: past tense in English, conditional and subjunctive mood in Spanish, habitual in Hindi, frustrative in Mapudungun, etc. This variation also supports the need to refrain from using the ‘subjunctive’ terminology.
The authors warn against simplifications such as the one I am laying out here. As they stress, transparency is not a language-level parameter, and “even English has corners where it is a “transparent language””. See von Fintel and Iatridou (2023) for clarifications.
I have omitted the case of counterfactual duties and desires (expressed in English with the combined expressions would have to and would want) from the data above. The reason is that in ‘pure’ counterfactual scenarios attainability and unattainability seem to be uniformly accepted. We can attest this in our core example: ‘If John gets himself involved in a double promise scenario, he would have to be in two places at the same time’. Bouletic conditionals of this type are also fairly easily construable—I will bypass this region and follow a straighter path here.
Again, it should be stressed that I conceive of the acceptability variation as a cline. As von Fintel and Iatridou (2023) report, both forms ‘I want/wish this weekend to last forever’ are acceptable in a transparent language like Greek. I have tested the corresponding forms with several native speakers of Spanish and the wish variant (either marked for conditional or subjunctive) is widely preferred. As a native speaker of Spanish, I support that judgement.
It is important to bear in mind that this assumption does not deny a parametric role to the other elements potentially invoked by x in (18). In effect, x can in principle stand for different facts in the overt CB schema. For example, one can construct an overt clause by invoking either a moral rule or the particular circumstances that trigger the obligation: ‘in view of our moral codes, John must...’; ‘in view of John having made a promise, he must...’. Both the normative and the realistic can play a parametric role in the interpretation of the modal. However, the crucial question for a specific theory of the modal-tense interaction is what time is indicated by tense. And insofar as moral rules (and normative standards in general), tend to be relatively atemporal, the natural suggestion is that tense indicates the time of the more material circumstances surrounding the subject.
In effect, as shown elsewhere for future obligations (Fuentes , 2020), the temporal location of the initial far left boundary of an obligation is semantically underspecified by the grammar. Crucially, the underspecification concerns the temporal point at which the relevant facts are triggered (hence, the time at which the obligational state becomes ascribable).
In effect, a test of common use in crosslinguistic fieldwork is based on the claim that weak necessity (built with should and ought in English) can be conjoined with the negation of a strong necessity clause [‘You ought to/should do the dishes but you don’t have to’; see von Fintel and Iatridou (2008)].
I suspect that this is the reason why English ought is interpreted differently in the two disciplines, a point that I cannot address here.
It is worth pointing out that there are other notions in classic and recent literature that may connect with the discussion here. Take for instance the ought-to-do/ought-to-be distinction drawn by Feldman 1986 (taken up in linguistics by Brennan (1993) and Hacquard (2006)) and the deliberative/objective distinction made by Cariani et al. (2013) (already mentioned in Sect. 2, see footnote 7). I will not integrate these notions into the main discussion, but only mention that the referred distinctions tend to describe possible interpretations of endorsed duties (that is to say, possible interpretations of what I have referred to as all things considered duty statements). This may be a rather simplistic picture. Things are surely more complicated due to the fact that the use of the prima facie/all things considered duties distinction vary considerably from author to author, and some variation might also be expected with respect to the other two pairs of notions. This means that the listed notions may be used to illuminate different aspects of either the endorsing statements, the underlying moral reasoning or even the circumstances involved in the situation under discussion (moral conflicts, unattainable duties, epistemic uncertainty or what have you). Since this brief subsection was not meant as a terminological regimentation, but only as an instrumental line-up for the specific discussion in the next two subsections, I have not attempted to make any substantial connection between these notions.
In comparative renditions such as (19), ‘\( \alpha <_g\beta \)’ means that \(\alpha \) is closer than \(\beta \) to the ideal set up by g.
The precise taxonomy of these statements is not important here but see Yanovich (2014), for an interesting proposal on symbouletic modality.
Note the potential that this working hypothesis may have for the analysis of a somewhat overlooked subclass of X-marked statements: polite expressions with bouletic like, such as ‘John, I would really like to go home now’ (instead of ‘John, I want to go home now’). Pragmatically speaking, the X-marking in this expression does not signal an unattainable desire to go home, but a pragmatic move away-from-the-ego—exactly what is missing in the (rather unpolite) want variant.
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I would like to thank the editor of Linguistics and Philosophy and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. I am also very grateful to Martina Faller and Graham Stevens, from the University of Manchester, for fruitful discussions on the very first draft of this article.
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Fuentes, P. Unattainable duties. Linguist and Philos 47, 1–36 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-023-09386-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-023-09386-1