On a Shared Property of Deontic and Epistemic Modals

Epistemic modals encode an evidential restriction, requiring that the speaker have inferential evidence for the prejacent (Karttunen, 1972). Stone (1994) and von Fintel and Gillies (2010) encode this restriction lexically in e.g. must, which (given a unified treatments of modals, Kratzer 1991) raises the question: what happens to this restriction when must receives a deontic interpretation? I claim that both deontic and epistemic modals have in common a requirement that their prejacent be inferred from some premises (Glass, 2013). I argue, following Lance and Little 2006, that this is a property of moral reasoning quite generally; in epistemic modal bases, it amounts to an inferential evidence requirement. Deontic and epistemic modals form a natural class with respect to this property to the exclusion of other modal bases; I argue that it is what prevents their acceptability in certain exclamatives (cf. *Wow, must Sue be the murderer! ). It also offers insight into why languages like English sometimes lexicalize these two modal bases to the exclusion of others.

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