WiP - Chenhao Lu / Shouldn't feel special
WiP - Chenhao Lu / Shouldn't feel special
Wednesday March 4, the Philosophy Department Works in Progress meeting has Chenhao Lu presenting his recent work on the logic of epistemic ought, abstracted below.
Sentences like (1) can take both deontic and epistemic readings.
(1) Leo should/ought to be here by 10.
On the deontic reading, (1) concerns what Leo is normatively required to do given some ideal. On the epistemic reading, (1) is roughly about what Leo is expected to do given our information.
Boylan (2023) argues that the logic of epistemic ought is special: Consistent Agglomeration holds for deontic ought, but fails for epistemic ought.
Consistent Agglomeration: Where p and q are consistent, ought (p), ought (q) |= ought (p&q)
I disagree. Apparent counterexamples to epistemic agglomeration are due to the context-sensitivity of the epistemic ought.
In this talk, I'll explore two contextualist strategies and defend a unified, Kratzer-style semantics for ought. The key idea is that deontic and epistemic ought behave differently, not because they have different logics, but because they interact differently with how the domain of quantification is conceptualized. In short, epistemic ought shouldn't feel special.