Meaning Meeting - Yunhui Bai / Epistemic 'might'
Meaning Meeting - Yunhui Bai / Epistemic 'might'
Monday Morning the Meaning Meeting meets at 10:30am in Wimbledon, where Yunhui Bai will discuss sentences like "It might or might not rain" and the challenge they pose for certain theories of the context for interpreting "might" claims.
I will be discussing sentences of the form 'might or might not p' (e.g. 'he might or might not be home') with epistemic 'might'. Understood either as ellipsis or as involving type-shifting, the sentence should be analyzed roughly as 'might p or might not p'. But this basic meaning presents a problem for the (already stipulative) bounded theory of epistemic modals, according to which the second 'might' should have a domain that's a subset of worlds that verify ~might p(=must not p), which gives rise to local triviality. Exhaustifying the disjuncts also creates problems. That said, it's not entirely clear how to derive the intuitive reading of these sentences