Epistemic modality devices are believed to be one of the prominent characteristics of research articles as the commonly used genre among the academic community members. Considering the importance of such devices in producing and comprehending scientific discourse, this study aimed to cross–culturally and cross-linguistically investigate epistemic modality markers as an important subcategory...

modal verbs and their different meanings can be investigated on the basis of various theoretical frameworks. in this paper, persian modal verbs are examined and analyzed in terms of degrees and kinds of modality proposed by palmer (1990). our analysis shows that although bǎyad ‘must’ does not entail the proposition, it is used to express three degrees of epistemic modality, two degrees of dynam...

1 Epistemic Possibility and Other Types of Possibility There is a lot that we don’t know. That means that there are a lot of possibilities that are, epistemically speaking, open. For instance, we don’t know whether it rained in Seattle yesterday. So, for us at least, there is an epistemic possibility where it rained in Seattle yesterday, and one where it did not. It’s tempting to give a very si...

Dissertation abstract

This essay examines the interaction between the project of metamathematics and the cognitive science of concepts. The aim of metamathematics, i.e., the methodology of the deductive sciences, is to provide a precise characterization of the concepts figuring in rigorous, formal theories (Tarski, 1930/1983). The concepts at issue include those familiar frommetalogical inquiry – e.g., completeness ...

Epistemic modals are interesting in part because their semantics is bound up both with our information about the world and with how that information changes as we share what we know. Given that epistemical modals are dependent in some way on the information available in the contexts in which they are used, it’s not surprising that there is a minor but growing industry of work in semantics and t...

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 th...

A dynamic semantics for epistemically modalized sentences is an attractive alternative to the orthodox view that our best theory of meaning ascribes to such sentences truth-conditions relative to what is known. I will demonstrate that a dynamic theory about might and must offers elegant explanations of a range of puzzling observations about epistemic modals. The first part of the story offers a...