Abstract
Part of what makes working with modals such a tricky business is that apparent modal forms are deployed in all sorts of ways in language. In this paper I explore an interesting example of an apparent modal—the Blofeld case—which was introduced by Gilles and von Fintel as part of their argument against context of assessment accounts of epistemic modals. I argue that the example is subtle, and that the apparent modal may not be an epistemic modal at all—it could be a scalar modifier that merges or “incorporates” with the matrix verb, weakening the meaning of the matrix verb. If apparent modals are used as scalar modifiers and are subject to movement and incorporation, then the surface language of modality may be throwing us some crafty head fakes. Caution is advised.
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Notes
If you don’t like the idea that utterances are true or false we can say that Eve judges that the proposition expressed by Pat’s utterance of (1) is false.
von Fintel and Gilles (2011) draw a different lesson from this case. They think (3) is an example of our ability to target the embedded proposition (embedded inside the modal claim). I’ll come back to this point in the conclusion.
If knowledge were the norm of assertion then Pat might be somewhat culpable, but it seems to me that modal cases like these show precisely that knowledge is not the norm of assertion. In any case, there are different kinds of culpability and Pat’s culpability for being wrong in this case is quite minimal. Kim has no business making an issue out of it.
Thanks to Richard Larson for this observation.
Could ‘must’ be a strengthening element? The test would be examples like ‘Blofeld wondered if Bond must be dead’. Does this suggest Blofeld has a stronger attitude than wondering regarding Bond’s suggested death? (For example suspecting?). My judgments on these cases are infirm.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to John Hawthorne, Richard Larson, Heidi Savage, and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri for discussion.
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Ludlow, P. Incorporation and Alleged Epistemic Modals. Topoi 36, 155–159 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-015-9348-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-015-9348-x