Review of Epistemic Modality

and so I will focus on this aspect of the volume, summarizing the remaining papers in my concluding remarks. The classical approach to modals from Kratzer treats them as existential or universal quantifiers over a contextually restricted set of possible worlds. Different flavors of modality—circumstantial, deontic, epistemic, etc.—correspond to different choices of contextually provided restrictors, preserving a unity in the semantics of modals while accounting for the variety of their interpretations in context. Epistemic interpretations arise in case the modal is interpreted as a quantifier over a set of possible worlds projected from a contextually salient body of evidence. If the contextually salient body of evidence is Bob’s knowledge, for instance, the proposition expressed by (1) is articulated explicitly thus: