Meaning Meeting - Paolo Santorio / How to contextualize epistemic modals
Meaning Meeting - Paolo Santorio / How to contextualize epistemic modals
Tuesday September 23, Paolo Santorio discusses the sensitivity of epistemic modals to context. To explain it he proposes that the meaning of every clause, besides the contribution it makes to what is (inter alia) asserted with sentences containing it, also includes an independent variable that ranges over the local context of its utterance, including information contributed by utterance of the sentence it occupies.
Matt Mandelkern has argued that the semantics of epistemic modals and related expressions is constrained by the local context. This is captured through a second grammatical layer devoted to “bounds,” which is independent of truth-conditions. I propose an alternative that dispenses with this extra layer. I suggest that each clause includes a variable tracking the value of the local context. The value of this variable is determined via a pragmatic algorithm, which requires the local context of a clause to include all the information that is recoverable from the rest of the sentence. I show that the theory captures some recalcitrant data for the original bounded theory, while using a simpler architecture.