Abstract
There is a difference between the conditions in which one can felicitously use a ‘must’-claim like (1-a) and those in which one can use the corresponding claim without the ‘must’, as in (1-b):
It is difficult to pin down just what this difference amounts to. And it is difficult to account for this difference, since assertions of \(\ulcorner \)Must p\(\urcorner \) and assertions of p alone seem to have the same basic goal: namely, communicating that p is true. In this paper I give a new account of the conversational role of ‘must’. I begin by arguing that a ‘must’-claim is felicitous only if there is a shared argument for the proposition it embeds. I then argue that this generalization, which I call Support, can explain the more familiar generalization that ‘must’-claims are felicitous only if the speaker’s evidence for them is in some sense indirect. Finally, I propose a pragmatic derivation of Support as a manner implicature.
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I thank two anonymous referees for this journal, and my editor, Paul Portner, for very helpful comments. Thanks to Joshua Knobe and Jonathan Phillips for invaluable help running and analyzing the experiment reported here, and to Justin Khoo and MIT for financial support for the experiment. This paper expands on Mandelkern (2017b), and I also thank my referees and audience at Sinn und Bedeutung 21; audiences at MIT, the University of Chicago, NYU, St. Andrews, and Hampshire College; and Justin Bledin, David Boylan, Agnes Callard, Nilanjan Das, Janice Dowell, Daniel Drucker, Kai von Fintel, Vera Flocke, Irene Heim, Matthias Jenny, Brendan de Kenessey, Justin Khoo, Angelika Kratzer, Daniel Lassiter, Rose Lenehan, Sarah Murray, Dilip Ninan, Jacopo Romoli, Bernhard Salow, Ginger Schultheis, Brett Sherman, Alex Silk, Daniel Skibra, Benjamin Spector, Robert Stalnaker, Matthew Stone, Eric Swanson, Roger White, and Stephen Yablo for very helpful comments and discussion.
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Mandelkern, M. What ‘must’ adds. Linguist and Philos 42, 225–266 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-018-9246-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-018-9246-y