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Epistemic Modals and Alternative Possibilities

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Abstract

Indicative judgments pertain to what is true. Epistemic modal judgments pertain to what must or might be true relative to a body of information. A standard view is that epistemic modals implicitly quantify over alternative possibilities, or ways things could turn out. On this view, a proposition must be true just in case it is true in all the possibilities consistent with the available information, and a proposition might be true just in case it is true in at least one possibility consistent with the available information. I report three experiments testing this view of epistemic modals. The results show that although modal judgments are sensitive to information about alternative possibilities, the standard quantification theory mischaracterizes the ordinary meaning of modals. I then report two more experiments testing the hypothesis that epistemic modals express willingness to attribute knowledge based on the available information. The results support this hypothesis. The results also show that the difference between “inside” and “outside” probabilistic information, familiar from the judgment and decision-making literature, affects epistemic modal judgments.

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Acknowledgements

For helpful feedback and discussion, I thank James Beebe, Wesley Buckwalter, Ori Friedman, Joshua Knobe, Daniel Lassiter, Lisa Matthewson, Jonathan Phillips, David Rose, and Angelo Turri. Thanks also to anonymous reviewers for this journal. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation, and the Canada Research Chairs program.

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  1. Philosophy Department and Cognitive Science Program, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON, N2L3G1, Canada

    John Turri

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Turri, J. Epistemic Modals and Alternative Possibilities. Erkenn 83, 1063–1084 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9929-8

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