On the semantics and pragmatics of epistemic modals

This paper explores a rich source of data for theories of this vocabulary. The debate over the viability of standard truth conditional theories has called attention to the distinctive behavior of epistemic vocabulary in eavesdropping judgments, indicative suppositions, and statements of disagreement and retraction. But extant accounts are not sufficiently sensitive to distinctive features of the way in which epistemic vocabulary interacts with other epistemic vocabulary. If we start by studying the behavior of simple nested epistemic modals, we may naturally build a theory that explains the more complicated behavior of epistemic modals under disjunction and over indicative conditionals, and even the puzzling effects of embedding epistemic vocabulary in classically valid arguments. In §1, I make unifying observations about the suggestive behavior of epistemic vocabulary in each of these contexts, extracting several desiderata for semantic and pragmatic theories.