Disagreement and Epistemic Modality
from MCMP – Epistemology
Elke Brendel (Bonn) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (17 June, 2015) titled "Disagreement and Epistemic Modality". Abstract: Intuitively, the truth conditions of sentences with epistemic modals, such as “It might be that p”, depend on what is epistemically known by a speaker or some contextually relevant group. That is why a contextualist account of epistemic modals seems to provide an adequate semantics for epistemic modal claims. However, contextualism has difficulties to account for the intuition of disagreement about epistemic modal claims: If A claims (according to his knowledge): “It might be that p” and B claims (according to her knowledge) “It cannot be that p”, A and B seem to disagree. They are not merely talking past each other. In my talk, I will first explore the notion of disagreement and present some necessary conditions for two parties disagreeing with each other. Second, I will critically examine the prospects of contextualist semantics as well as truth-relativist accounts in dealing with disagreement about epistemic modal claims. I will finally analyze arguments in favor of an invariantist theory of epistemic modality.
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