Epistemic Modality, Factivity, and Relativism

The weak epistemic modal operators might, possible, likely, and probable display embedding behaviors and scope interactions that are interestingly different from their logically stronger counterparts must and certain. I present two problematic sets of facts about these operators which have not received much attention in the literature. The first is that weak epistemic modals embed freely under factives. I show that the epistemic modal have a dual meaning in these contexts: the at-issue content is necessarily tied to the attitude holder, while the interpretation of the modal in the presupposed content is not. Contextualist and expressivist approaches to epistemic modals fail to explain these facts. However, a moderate relativist semantics along the lines of MacFarlane (2010) can do the job.