Restriction without Quantification: Embedding and Probability for Indicative Conditionals

Many modern theories of indicative conditionals treat them as restricted epistemic necessity modals. This view, however, faces two problems. First, indicative conditionals do not behave like necessity modals in embedded contexts, e.g., under ‘might’ and ‘probably’: in these contexts, conditionals do not contribute a universal quantification over epistemic possibilities. Second, when we assess the probability of a conditional, we do not assess how likely it is that the consequent is epistemically necessary given the antecedent. I propose a semantics which solves both problems, while still accounting for the data that motivated the necessity modal view. The account is based on the idea that the semantics of conditionals involves only a restriction of the relevant epistemic state, and no quantification over epistemic possibilities. The relevant quantification is contributed by an attitude parameter in the semantics, which is shifted by epistemic modals. If the conditional is asserted, the designated attitude is acceptance, which contributes a universal quantification, producing the effect of a restricted necessity modal.

Bias and Modality in Conditionals: Experimental Evidence and Theoretical Implications

The concept of bias is familiar to linguists primarily from the literature on questions. Following the work of Giannakidou and Mari (Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought: Modality, Mood, and Propositional Attitudes, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2021), we assume “nonveridical equilibrium” (implying that p and ¬p as equal possibilities) to be the default for epistemic modals, questions and conditionals. The equilibrium of conditionals, as that of questions, can be manipulated to produce bias (i.e., reduced or higher speaker commitment). In this paper, we focus on three kinds of modal elements in German that create bias in conditionals and questions: the adverb wirklich ‘really’, the modal verb sollte ‘should’, and conditional connectives such as falls ‘if/in case’. We conducted two experiments collecting participants’ inference about speaker commitment in different manipulations, Experiment 1 on sollte/wirklich in ob-questions and wenn-conditionals, and Experiment 2 on sollte/wirklich in wenn/falls/V1-conditionals. Our findings are that both ob-questions and falls-conditionals express reduced speaker commitment about the modified (antecedent) proposition in comparison to wenn-conditionals, which did not differ from V1-conditionals. In addition, sollte/wirklich in the antecedent of conditionals both create negative bias about the antecedent proposition. Our studies are among the first that deal with bias in conditionals (in comparison to questions) and contribute to furthering our understanding of bias.

Inferential Expressivism and the Negation Problem

This chapter develops a novel solution to the negation version of the Frege–Geach problem by taking up recent insights from the bilateral programme in logic. Bilateralists explain the meaning of negation in terms of a primitive B-type inconsistency involving the attitudes of assent and dissent. Some may demand an explanation of this inconsistency in simpler terms, but here it is argued that bilateralism’s assumptions are no less explanatory than those of A-type semantics that only require a single primitive attitude, but must stipulate inconsistency elsewhere. A version of B-type expressivism called inferential expressivism—a novel semantic framework that characterizes meanings by inferential roles that define which attitudes one can infer from the use of terms—is developed. This framework is applied to normative vocabulary, thereby solving the Frege–Geach problem generally and comprehensively. The chapter includes a semantics for epistemic modals, thereby also explaining normative terms under epistemic modals.

The restrictor view, without covert modals

The view that if-clauses function semantically as restrictors is widely regarded as the only candidate for a fully general account of conditionals. The standard implementation of this view assumes that, where no operator to be restricted is in sight, if-clauses restrict covert epistemic modals. Stipulating such modals, however, lacks independent motivation and leads to wrong empirical predictions. In this paper I provide a theory of conditionals on which if-clauses are uniformly interpreted as restrictors, but no covert modals are postulated. Epistemic if-clauses, like those in bare conditionals, restrict an information state parameter which is used to interpret an expressive layer of the language. I show that this theory yields an attractive account of bare and overtly modalized conditionals and solves various empirical problems for the standard view, while dispensing with its less plausible assumption.

From dynamic modal to conditional protasis connective

The grammaticalization literature has not demonstrated convincingly how, if at all, dynamic modals may develop into conditional protasis connectives. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative evidence from Chinese, this paper hypothesizes that such a directionality may arise through univerbation between dynamic modals and protasis connectives (e.g. ruò ‘if’ + néng ‘be able to’ > ruònéng ‘if’). Furthermore, this paper suggests that functional compatibility in terms of performativity may explain why dynamic modals tend to grammaticalize into connectives in pre-established conditional protases, while deontic and epistemic modals do so in main clauses.

Ignorance, Introspection, and Epistemic Modals

Embedded epistemic modals are infelicitous under desire predicates when they are anchored to the belief state of the attitude holder (see, esp., Anand & Hacquard 2013). We present two ways of deriving this observation from an inde- pendently motivated property of desire predicates (Heim 1992; von Fintel 1999).

Fallibilism and Consequence

Alex Worsnip argues in favor of what he describes as a particularly robust version of fallibilism: subjects can sometimes know things that are, for them, possibly false (in the epistemic sense of ‘possible’). My aim in this paper is to show that Worsnip’s argument is inconclusive for a surprising reason: the existence of possibly false knowledge turns on how we ought to model entailment or consequence relations among sentences in natural language. Since it is an open question how we ought to think about consequence in natural language, it is an open question whether there is possibly false knowledge. I close with some reflections on the relation between possibly false knowledge and fallibilism. I argue that there is no straightforward way to use linguistic data about natural language epistemic modals to either verify or refute the fallibilist thesis.