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Truth-assessment and retraction of epistemic modals : Empirical data| old_uid | 15473 |
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| title | Truth-assessment and retraction of epistemic modals : Empirical data |
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| start_date | 2015/04/08 |
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| schedule | 16h-18h |
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| online | no |
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| details | Commentator: Roberto Casati (CNRS, IJN) |
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| summary | Utterances involving epistemic modals, i.e. expressions like ‘might’, ‘may’ or ‘must’, express states of epistemic certainty or uncertainty regarding a particular state of affairs. Such claims are thus dependent on a contextually salient epistemic perspective. According to standard contextualism, the default perspective is the one of the speaker, and it is considered part of the content expressed. By contrast, relativists (Egan, 2007; MacFarlane 2014) argue that epistemic modals depend on the perspective of the assessor of the utterance, and that said perspective must be formalized as a parameter in the circumstances of evaluation.
The two approaches make radically different predictions regarding the truth-assessment of epistemic modals and as concerns the need to retract utterances whose embedded claims turn out false. I will present new data from a variety of experiments regarding both truth-assessment and retraction. The data suggests that radical relativists, who frequently motivate their assessment-sensitive semantics by aid of intuitions involving epistemic modals, might have considerably overplayed their hand. |
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| responsibles | Bantegnie |
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