According to one view of alethic modality, alethic modality is deontic modality with respect to thoughts or language. To say that something is necessary is to prescribe norms on how we must think or use language. This view has been argued to have many philosophical advantages over the traditional view that takes alethic modality to describe things in the world. In this article, I argue that the deontic view also enjoys a wide range of empirical support from linguistics and psychology.

Crosslinguistically, the same modal words can be used to express a wide range of interpretations. This crosslinguistic trend supports a Kratzerian analysis, where each modal has a core lexical entry and where the difference between an epistemic and a root interpretation is contextually determined. A long-standing problem for such a unified account is the equally robust crosslinguistic correlation between a modal’s interpretation and its syntactic behavior: epistemics scope high (in particular higher than tense and aspect) and roots low, a fact (...) which has led to proposals that hardwire different syntactic positions for epistemics and roots (cf. Cinque’s hierarchy). This paper argues that the range of interpretations a modal receives is even more restricted: a modal must be keyed to certain time-individual pairs, but not others. I show that this can be captured straightforwardly by minimally modifying the Kratzerian account: modals are relative to an event—rather than a world—of evaluation, which readily provides a time (the event’s running time) and (an) individual(s) (the event’s participants). I propose that this event relativity of modals can in turn explain the correlation between type of interpretation and syntactic position, without stipulation of an interpretation-specific height for modals. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, modal epistemology has turned its attention to ordinary modal knowledge. This paper brings to the fore a neglected but central form of ordinary modal knowledge: knowledge of agentive modality, and in particular of our own abilities, which I call ‘ability knowledge’. I argue that modal epistemology as it is does not account for ability knowledge, by looking at the most promising candidate theories: perception-based, counterfactual-based, and similarity-based modal epistemologies. I then outline a more promising epistemology (...) for our ability knowledge, which relies on the experience of our own agency, and draw out some lessons for modal epistemology in general. (shrink)

The critics in this volume raise several important challenges to the modal normativist position developed in Norms and Necessity, including whether the relation I claim holds between semantic rules and necessity claims generates spurious claims of metaphysical necessity, whether the view is circular (implicitly relying on a more 'robust' form of modal realism), and whether it conflicts with truth-conditional semantics. They also raise probing questions about how it compares to other views of modality, including a Lewisian view and an essentialist (...) view. In these replies, I respond to these challenges in ways that precisify the relevant understanding of ‘semantic rules' and the forms they can take, that make clearer the direction of explanation in modal normativism in ways that show the view doesn't rely on a more ‘robust’ form of modal realism, and that give reason for thinking that there is actually no conflict between modal normativism and truth-conditional semantics. I also aim to give a fuller assessment of how it compares to other approaches to modality, including an essentialist approach. (shrink)

It is widely assumed in the developmental literature that certain classes of modal expression appear later in language acquisition than others; specifically, epistemic interpretations lag behind non-epistemic interpretations. An explanation for these findings is proposed in terms of the child’s developing theory of mind, i.e. the ability to attribute to oneself and others mental representations, and to reason inferentially about them. It is hypothesized that epistemic modality crucially implicates theory-of-mind abilities and is therefore expected to depend on prior developments in (...) the child's ability to handle representations of mental representations. In support of this hypothesis, it is shown that autistic individuals have difficulty with epistemics. (shrink)

It has been argued that the primary acquisition of genericity in early child speech poses a problem for standard quantificational approaches to generics and instead motivates the claim that generics give voice to an innate, default mode of generalising. This article argues that analogous puzzles involving the acquisition of A‐quantifiers undermine the empirical support for a purely cognition‐based approach to generics. Instead, these acquisition puzzles should be solved by generalising the core insight of the cognitive defaults theory to these expressions, (...) reconciling formal semantic approaches with the role that cognitive development plays on lexical competence. (shrink)

How should knowledge be analyzed? Compositionally, as having constituents like belief and justification, or as an atomic concept? In making arguments for or against these perspectives, epistemologists have begun to use experimental evidence from developmental psychology and developmental linguistics. If we were to conclude that knowledge were developmentally prior to belief, then we might have a good basis to claim that belief is not a constituent of knowledge. In this review, I present a broad range of developmental evidence from the (...) past decade and discuss some of the implications it has for the proper analysis of knowledge. The orthodox perspective from the developmental literature was one where children fail to understand belief and knowledge concepts until later in childhood, with typical asymmetries in belief attribution and knowledge attribution. But what emerges from both a discussion of newer findings and a contextualization of older findings is a picture of development whereby core competence with belief and knowledge concepts emerges much earlier than previously thought that apparent failures in later childhood may be explained by other aspects of development than conceptual development and that there is no clear evidence that knowledge attributions emerge earlier than belief attributions. (shrink)

The perennial fascination with the relationship between language and thought has generated much research across various disciplines. In recent years, commentators have called for closer examination of the connection between language acquisition and conceptual development (Bowerman & Levinson, 2001). Rather than assuming that language development always presupposes cognitive development, several researchers have started considering whether language learning could transform conceptual structure by making certain concepts available to the learner (e.g., de Villiers & Pyers, 1997; Gopnik & Choi, 1995; Bowerman, 1996).

This paper investigates when and how children figure out the force of modals: that possibility modals (e.g., _can_/_might_) express possibility, and necessity modals (e.g., _must_/_have to_) express necessity. Modals raise a classic subset problem: given that necessity entails possibility, what prevents learners from hypothesizing possibility meanings for necessity modals? Three solutions to such subset problems can be found in the literature: the first is for learners to rely on downward-entailing (DE) environments (Gualmini and Schwarz in J. Semant. 26(2):185–215, 2009 ); (...) the second is a bias for strong (here, necessity) meanings; the third is for learners to rely on pragmatic cues stemming from the conversational context (Dieuleveut et al. in Proceedings of the 2019 Amsterdam colloqnium, pp. 111–122, 2019a ; Rasin and Aravind in Nat. Lang. Semant. 29:339–375, 2020 ). This paper assesses the viability of each of these solutions by examining the modals used in speech to and by 2-year-old children, through a combination of corpus studies and experiments testing the guessability of modal force based on their context of use. Our results suggest that, given the way modals are used in speech to children, the first solution is not viable and the second is unnecessary. Instead, we argue that the conversational context in which modals occur is highly informative as to their force and sufficient, in principle, to sidestep the subset problem. Our child results further suggest an early mastery of possibility—but not necessity—modals and show no evidence for a necessity bias. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to reconsider certain assumptions about conceptual structure which have become influential in recent Cognitive Science and which are associated in particular with the Cognitive Linguistics research agenda. I will outline three areas within the Cognitive Linguistics theory of concepts which seem to create some difficulties in their present formulation: the 'embodied cognition' idea, the function of imagery and the role of metaphor in the structure of concepts.