Nonfactualism about Epistemic Modality

When I tell you that it’s raining, I describe a way the world is—viz., rainy. I say something factual, something whose truth turns on how things are with some aspect of the world. Likewise when I tell you that the weatherman thinks that it’s raining. Here the truth of what I say turns on a different feature of the world, namely, the weatherman’s state of mind. Likewise when I tell you that I think that it’s raining. Here the truth of what I say turns on yet another feature of the world, namely, my state of mind. Nothing like tedious platitudes to set the mood.1 Okay—what about when I tell you that it might be raining? Or that it is probably raining? Or that it must be raining? In these cases, am I again to be understood as describing a way the world is? An affirmative answer would be nice. For it seems like it would mean less work. It would let us take the view that sentences like these—sentences with epistemic modal operators taking wide scope—are not special. It would let us apply to these sentences whatever semantic and pragmatic explanatory strategies we already apply to other uncontroversially descriptive, fact-describing discourse. And, from a distance at least, an affirmative answer seems anyway not hard to pull off. Epistemic modals are socalled, after all, because they seem to serve to communicate information about some epistemic state or state of evidence. And states of evidence are, of course, aspects of the world. One could try, then, understanding epistemically modalized sentences— these sentences about what might or must be, or about what is probable—as telling