An Opinionated Guide to Epistemic Modality

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 the philosophy of language concerned with the precise nature of the context-dependency of epistemically modalized sentences. Take, for instance, an epistemic might-claim like (1) Jimbo might go to the party. This sentence is true iff Jimbo’s party-going is compatible with some (relevant) body of information. But that is where agreement ends. Whose information counts? Maybe it is just the knowledge of the speaker that is relevant. Maybe it is the knowledge of the speaker plus her conversational partners. Maybe it is information in some looser sense than knowledge that is relevant, or maybe epistemic modals require some more delicate way of aggregating that information. These strategies are all ways of exploring the extent to which epistemic modals are context-dependent. But maybe it isn’t even information available in the context of utterance that is primarily relevant in the first place. That would make the