CIA Leaks

Philosophical Review, The - Tập 117 Số 1 - Trang 77-98 - 2008
Kai von Fintel, Anthony S. Gillies

Tóm tắt

Epistemic modals are standardly taken to be context-dependent quantifiers over possibilities. Thus sentences containing them get truth-values with respect to both a context and an index. But some insist that this relativization is not relative enough: `might'-claims, they say, only get truth-values with respect to contexts, indices, and—the new wrinkle—points of assessment (hence, cia). Here we argue against such “relativist” semantics. We begin with a sketch of the motivation for such theories and a generic formulation of them. Then we catalogue central problems that any such theory faces. We end by outlining an alternative story.

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