Epistemic modals in consequent place of indicative conditionals give rise to apparent counterexamples to Modus Tollens. Familiar assumptions behind familiar truth conditional theories of embedded modality facilitate a prima facie explanation—viz., that the target cases harbor epistemic modal equivocations. However, this sort of explanation goes too far. It fosters other predictions of equivocation in places where in fact there are none. It is argued that the solution is to drop the credo that modal claims are inherently relational in favor of (...) a view that treats them as inherently quantificational. In particular it is suggested that epistemic modals express covert mass noun descriptions of information of the form “the actionable information stands in logical relation L to prejacent p”. We demonstrate how this approach unlocks the equivocation problem. (shrink)

We distinguish three ways that a theory of linguistic meaning and communication might be considered dynamic in character. We provide some examples of systems which are dynamic in some of these senses but not others. We suggest that separating these notions can help to clarify what is at issue in particular debates about dynamic versus static approaches within natural language semantics and pragmatics.

There is a longstanding debate in the literature about static versus dynamic approaches to meaning and conversation. A formal result due to van Benthem is often thought to be important for understanding what, conceptually speaking, is at issue in the debate. We introduce the concept of a conversation system, and we use it to clarify the import of van Benthem's result. We then distinguish two classes of conversation systems, corresponding to two concepts of staticness. The first class corresponds to a (...) generalization of the class of systems that van Benthem's result concerns. These are the strongly static conversation systems. The second class is broader, and allows for a certain commonly recognized form of context sensitivity. These are the weakly static conversation systems. In the vein of van Benthem's result, we supply representation theorems which independently characterize these two varieties of conversation system. We observe that some canonically dynamic semantic systems correspond to weakly static conversation systems. We close by discussing some hazards that arise in trying to bring our formal results to bear on natural language phenomena, and on the debate about whether the compositional semantics for natural language should take a dynamic shape. (shrink)

Barristers in England are obliged to follow the ‘cab rank rule’, according to which they must take any case offered to them, as long as they have time in their.

IntroductionThe project of giving an account of meaning in natural languages goes largely by assigning truth-conditional content to sentences. I will call the view that sentences have truth-conditional content propositionalism as it is common to identify the truth-conditional content of a sentence with the proposition it expresses. This content plays an important role in our explanations of the speech-acts, attitude ascriptions, and the meaning of sentences when they appear as parts of longer sentences. Much work in philosophy of language and (...) linguistics semantics over the last half-century has aimed to characterize the truth-conditional content of different aspects of language.There are different kinds of worries one might have about this project. There are general methodological worries about truth-conditional semantics that have had some currency in the philosophical literature. In my view, the enormous progress in semantics made in its brief history suggests these are misplaced. Ho .. (shrink)

We present a puzzle about knowledge, probability and conditionals. We show that in certain cases some basic and plausible principles governing our reasoning come into conflict. In particular, we show that there is a simple argument that a person may be in a position to know a conditional the consequent of which has a low probability conditional on its antecedent, contra Adams’ Thesis. We suggest that the puzzle motivates a very strong restriction on the inference of a conditional from a (...) disjunction. (shrink)

I give an account of the compositional semantics of unconditionals that explains their relationship to if -conditionals in the Lewis/Kratzer/Heim tradition. Unconditionals involve an alternative-denoting adjunct that supplies domain restrictions pointwise to a main-clause operator such as a modal. The differences from if -clauses follow from the structure of the adjuncts; both are conditionals in the Lewisian sense. In the course of treating unconditionals, I provide a concrete implementation of conditionals where conditional adjuncts in general are a species of correlative, (...) and show what detaching this hypothesis from if involves. (shrink)

This paper examines a neglected puzzle about conditionals: namely, the fact that each of a pair of conditionals with incompatible consequents, [A > C] and [B > C*], may be properly affirmable in circumstances when one does not believe, and is not entitled to infer, the denial of the conjunction of the antecedents, i.e. ~(A & B). The puzzle is why this should be so, since the conditionals entail the conjunction on the popular accounts of conditionals. I present a pragmatic (...) solution which distinguishes between two levels of affirmability. (shrink)

According to Stalnaker’s Thesis, the probability of a conditional is the conditional probability. Under some mild conditions, the thesis trivialises probabilities and conditionals, as initially shown by David Lewis. This article asks the following question: does still lead to triviality, if the probability function in is replaced by a probability-like function? The article considers plausibility functions, in the sense of Friedman and Halpern, which additionally mimic probabilistic additivity and conditionalisation. These quasi probabilities comprise Friedman–Halpern’s conditional plausibility spaces, as well as (...) other known representations of conditional doxastic states. The paper proves Lewis’ triviality for quasi probabilities and discusses how this has implications for three other prominent strategies to avoid Lewis’ triviality: Adams’ thesis, where the probability function on the left in is replaced by a probability-like function, abandoning conditionalisation, where probability conditionalisation on the right in is replaced by another propositional update procedure and the approximation thesis, where equality in is replaced by approximation. The paper also shows that Lewis’ triviality result is really about ‘additiveness’ and ‘conditionality’. (shrink)

A conversation can be conceived as aiming to circumscribe a set of possibilities that are relevant to the goals of the conversation. This set of possibilities may be conceived as determined by the goals and objective circumstances of the interlocutors and not by their propositional attitudes. An indicative conditional can be conceived as circumscribing a set of possibilities that have a certain property: If the set of relevant possibilities is subsequently restricted to one in which the antecedent holds, then it (...) will be restricted as well to one in which the consequent holds. We will identify a number of desiderata concerning the validity of arguments; we will develop a formally precise semantics for conditionals conceived in this way that satisfies the desiderata, and we will present a deductive calculus that is sound and complete with respect to the semantics. Finally, we will argue that the semantics compares well, both formally and foundationally, with two other semantic theories of indicative conditionals that satisfy the desiderata, namely, those of Gillies and Bledin. (shrink)

Many languages have past-and-counterfactuality markers such as English simple past. There have been various attempts to find a common definition for both uses, but I will argue in this paper that they all have problems with (a) ruling out unacceptable interpretations, or (b) accounting for the contrary-to-fact implicature of counterfactual conditionals, or (c) predicting the observed cross-linguistic variation, or a combination thereof. By combining insights from two basic lines of reasoning, I will propose a simple and transparent approach that solves (...) all the observed problems and offers a new understanding of the concept of counterfactuality. (shrink)

The 3sg pronouns “he” and “she” impose descriptive gender conditions on their referents. These conditions are standardly analysed as presuppositions. Cooper argues that, when 3sg pronouns occur free, they have indexical presuppositions: the gender condition must be satisfied by the pronoun’s referent in the actual world. In this paper, we consider the behaviour of free 3sg pronouns in conditionals and focus on cases in which the pronouns’ gender presuppositions no longer seem to be indexical and project locally instead. We compare (...) these cases to previously reported shifty readings of indexicals in so-called “epistemic conditionals” :359–406, 2012) and propose a unified account of locally projected gender presuppositions and shifty indexicals based on the idea that indicative conditionals are Kaplanian monsters. (shrink)

This paper describes a cubic water tank equipped with a movable partition receiving various amounts of liquid used to represent joint probability distributions. This device is applied to the investigation of deductive inferences under uncertainty. The analogy is exploited to determine by qualitative reasoning the limits in probability of the conclusion of twenty basic deductive arguments (such as Modus Ponens, And-introduction, Contraposition, etc.) often used as benchmark problems by the various theoretical approaches to reasoning under uncertainty. The probability bounds imposed (...) by the premises on the conclusion are derived on the basis of a few trivial principles such as "a part of the tank cannot contain more liquid than its capacity allows", or "if a part is empty, the other part contains all the liquid". This stems from the equivalence between the physical constraints imposed by the capacity of the tank and its subdivisions on the volumes of liquid, and the axioms and rules of probability. The device materializes de Finetti's coherence approach to probability. It also suggests a physical counterpart of Dutch book arguments to assess individuals' rationality in probability judgments in the sense that individuals whose degrees of belief in a conclusion are out of the bounds of coherence intervals would commit themselves to executing physically impossible tasks. (shrink)

The paper begins by focusing the basic idea that Gestalt phenomena belong not only to the realm of perception but to the realm of inference. It is shown that Gestalt effects often occur both in counterfactual and in ampliative – i.e. inductive and abductive – reasoning. The main thesis of the paper is that the common feature of such forms of non-deductive reasoning is provided by a rational selection between incompatible conclusions, where rationality lies in the choice of the alternative (...) which preserves the maximum of background information. It is also stressed a distinction between a weak and a strong notion of incompatibility. Such distinction may help in giving account of some alleged Gestalt phenomena which have been recognized in theory construction and theory change. (shrink)

Arguments have always played a central role within logic and philosophy. But little attention has been paid to arguments as a distinctive kind of discourse, with its own semantics and pragmatics. The goal of this essay is to study the mechanisms by means of which we make arguments in discourse, starting from the semantics of argument connectives such as `therefore'. While some proposals have been made in the literature, they fail to account for the distinctive anaphoric behavior of `therefore', as (...) well as uses of argument connectives in complex arguments, suppositional arguments, arguments with non-declarative conclusions, as well as arguments with parenthetical remarks. A comprehensive account of arguments requires imposing a distinctive tree-like structure on contexts. We show how to extend our account to accommodate modal subordination and and di fferent flavors of `therefore'. (shrink)

This essay argues that the main lesson of Lewis Carroll's Regress is that arguments are constitutively presuppositional.

Traditional procedures for rational updating fail when it comes to self-locating opinions, such as your credences about where you are and what time it is. This paper develops an updating procedure for rational agents with self-locating beliefs. In short, I argue that rational updating can be factored into two steps. The first step uses information you recall from your previous self to form a hypothetical credence distribution, and the second step changes this hypothetical distribution to reflect information you have genuinely (...) learned as time has passed. While the second step resembles traditional procedures of updating by conditionalization, the first is best understood by analogy to traditional models of how agents transmit self-locating opinions through ordinary interpersonal communication. (shrink)

Certain measurement-related constructions impose a requirement that the measure function used track the part-whole structure of the domain of measurement, so that a given entity or eventuality must have a larger measurement in the chosen dimension than any of its salient proper parts. I provide evidence from English and Chinese that these constructions can be used to measure the intensity of mental states like hatred and love, indicating that in the natural language ontology of such states, intensity correlates with part-whole (...) structure. A natural language metaphysics of psychological intensity meeting this requirement is then developed and integrated into the semantics. Further complications arise when looking at attitudes like want, wish, and regret, which also permit measurements of intensity in the relevant constructions. To account for such attitudes, the ontology and semantics are then enriched in a way that integrates ordering and quantification over possible worlds into the part-whole structure of attitude states, so that even in these more complicated cases, the constructions at hand have a unified compositional semantics. (shrink)

In the tradition of substructural logics, it has been claimed for a long time that conjunction and inclusive disjunction are ambiguous:we should, in fact, distinguish between ‘lattice’ connectives (also called additive or extensional) and ‘group’ connectives (also called multiplicative or intensional). We argue that an analogous ambiguity affects the quantifiers. Moreover, we show how such a perspective could yield solutions for two well-known logical puzzles: McGee’s counterexample to modus ponens and the lottery paradox.

People reject ‘paradoxical’ inferences, such as: Luisa didn't play music; therefore, if Luisa played soccer, then she didn't play music. For some theorists, they are invalid for everyday conditionals, but valid in logic. The theory of mental models implies that they are valid, but unacceptable because the conclusion refers to a possibility inconsistent with the premise. Hence, individuals should accept them if the conclusions refer only to possibilities consistent with the premises: Luisa didn't play soccer; therefore, if Luisa played a (...) game then she didn't play soccer. Two experiments corroborated this prediction for three sorts of ‘paradox’, including a disjunctive paradox. (shrink)

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

One very popular kind of semantics for subjunctive conditionals is aclosest-worlds account along the lines of theories given by David Lewisand Robert Stalnaker. If we could give the same sort of semantics forindicative conditionals, we would have a more unified account of themeaning of ``if ... then ...'' statements, one with manyadvantages for explaining the behaviour of conditional sentences. Such atreatment of indicative conditionals, however, has faced a battery ofobjections. This paper outlines a closest-worlds account of indicativeconditionals that does better (...) than some of its cousins in explaining thebehaviour of such conditionals. The paper then discusses objectionsoffered by Dorothy Edgington and Frank Jackson to closest-worldsaccounts of indicative conditionals, and shows that these objections canbe met by the account outlined. (shrink)

The hypothetical syllogism is invalid in standard interpretations of conditional sentences. Many arguments of this sort are quite compelling, though, and you can wonder what makes them so. I shall argue that it is our parsimony in regard to connections among events and states of affairs. All manner of things just might, for all we know, be bound up with one another in all sorts of ways. But ordinarily it is better, being simpler, to assume they are unconnected. In so (...) doing, we jump to the conclusions of some compelling but invalid arguments. (shrink)

Sir David Ross introduced prima facie duties, or acts with a tendency to be duties proper. He also spoke of general prima facie principles, wwhich attribute to acts having some feature the tendency to be a duty proper. Like Utilitarians from Mill to Hare, he saw a role for such principles in the epistemology of duty: in the process by means of which, in any given situation, a moral code can help us to find out what we ought to do.After (...) formalizing general prima facie principles as universally quantified conditionals I will show how seeming duties can be detached from them. There will be examples involving lies, burnt offerings and the question of whether to have a napkin on your lap while eating asparagus. They will illustrate the defeasibility of this detachment, how it can lead into dilemmas, and how general prima facie principles are overridden by more specific ones. (shrink)

Deliberative democrats have abandoned the ideal of consensus in favour of a range of different, more realistic alternatives. But these alternatives provide little anchorage to guide or even evaluat...

European Journal of Political Theory, Ahead of Print. Deliberative democrats have abandoned the ideal of consensus in favour of a range of different, more realistic alternatives. But these alternatives provide little anchorage to guide or even evaluate deliberative practice – something acutely problematic given the contemporary context of accelerating polarization in many advanced liberal democracies. In this article, we turn to Stalnaker’s account of the ‘common ground’ – the shared pool of information that is agreed upon by the parties to (...) a discourse – to reassert a distinct ideal standard for democratic deliberation which remains malleable enough to apply across messy contexts of real-world political contestation and debate. Our account offers an appropriate normative yardstick by which to assess deliberative practices across different discursive contexts, as well as impetus for further experimentation and innovation in efforts towards democratic renewal and reform. (shrink)

We introduce an expected-value theory of linguistic modality that makes reference to expected utility and a likelihood-based confirmation measure for deontics and epistemics, respectively. The account is a probabilistic semantics for deontics and epistemics, yet it proposes that deontics and epistemics share a common core modal semantics, as in traditional possible-worlds analysis of modality. We argue that this account is not only theoretically advantageous, but also has far-reaching empirical consequences. In particular, we predict modal versions of reasoning fallacies from the (...) heuristics and biases literature. Additionally, we derive the modal semantics in an entirely transparent manner, as it is based on the compositional semantics of Korean modal expressions that are morphosyntactically decomposed into a conditional and an evaluative predicate. (shrink)

I explore the logic of the conditional, using credence judgments to argue against Duality and in favor of Conditional Excluded Middle. I then explore how to give a theory of the conditional which validates the latter and not the former, developing a variant on Kratzer (1981)'s restrictor theory, as well as a proposal which combines Stalnaker (1968)'s theory of the conditional with the theory of epistemic modals I develop in Mandelkern 2019a. I argue that the latter approach fits naturally with (...) a conception of conditionals as referential devices which allow us to talk about particular worlds. (shrink)

I discuss what I call practical Moore sentences: sentences like ‘You must close your door, but I don’t know whether you will’, which combine an order together with an avowal of agnosticism about whether the order will be obeyed. I show that practical Moore sentences are generally infelicitous. But this infelicity is surprising: it seems like there should be nothing wrong with giving someone an order while acknowledging that you do not know whether it will obeyed. I suggest that this (...) infelicity points to a striking psychological fact, with potentially broad ramifications concerning the structure of norms of speech acts: namely, when giving an order, we must act as if we believe we will be obeyed. (shrink)

The Identity principle says that conditionals with the form 'If p, then p' are logical truths. Identity is overwhelmingly plausible, and has rarely been explicitly challenged. But a wide range of conditionals nonetheless invalidate it. I explain the problem, and argue that the culprit is the principle known as Import-Export, which we must thus reject. I then explore how we can reject Import-Export in a way that still makes sense of the intuitions that support it, arguing that the differences between (...) indicative and subjunctive conditionals play a key role in solving this puzzle. (shrink)

Two recent and influential papers, van Rooij 2007 and Lassiter 2012, propose solutions to the proviso problem that make central use of related notions of independence—qualitative in the first case, probabilistic in the second. We argue here that, if these solutions are to work, they must incorporate an implicit assumption about presupposition accommodation, namely that accommodation does not interfere with existing qualitative or probabilistic independencies. We show, however, that this assumption is implausible, as updating beliefs with conditional information does not (...) in general preserve independencies. We conclude that the approach taken by van Rooij and Lassiter does not succeed in resolving the proviso problem. (shrink)

Import-Export says that a conditional 'If p, if q, r' is always equivalent to the conditional 'If p and q, r'. I argue that Import-Export does not sit well with a classical approach to conjunction: given some plausible and widely accepted principles about conditionals, Import-Export together with classical conjunction leads to absurd consequences. My main goal is to draw out these surprising connections. In concluding I argue that the right response is to reject Import-Export and adopt instead a limited version (...) which better fits natural language data; accounts for all the intuitions that motivate Import-Export in the first place; and fits better with a classical conjunction. (shrink)

Compare the following conditionals: 'If John is not in Paris, he is in France' versus 'If John is in France, he is not in Paris.' The second sounds entirely natural, whereas the first sounds quite strange. This contrast is puzzling, because these two conditionals have the same structure at a certain level of logical abstraction, namely 'If ¬p+, then p.' -/- We argue that existing theories of informational oddness do not distinguish between these conditionals. We do not have an account (...) of the divergence in judgments about the two, but we think this is a fascinating puzzle which we pose here in the hope others will be able to solve it. (shrink)

What does 'might' mean? One hypothesis is that 'It might be raining' is essentially an avowal of ignorance like 'For all I know, it's raining'. But it turns out these two constructions embed in different ways, in particular as parts of larger constructions like Wittgenstein's 'It might be raining and it's not' and Moore's 'It's raining and I don't know it', respectively. A variety of approaches have been developed to account for those differences. All approaches agree that both Moore sentences (...) and Wittgenstein sentences are classically consistent. In this paper I argue against this consensus. I adduce a variety of new data which I argue can best be accounted for if we treat Wittgenstein sentences as being classically inconsistent. This creates a puzzle, since there is decisive reason to think that 'Might p' is classically consistent with 'Not p'. How can it also be that 'Might p and not p' and 'Not p and might p' are classically inconsistent? To make sense of this situation, I propose a new theory of epistemic modals and their interaction with embedding operators. This account makes sense of the subtle embedding behavior of epistemic modals, shedding new light on their meaning and, more broadly, the dynamics of information in natural language. -/- . (shrink)

Bradley offers a quick and convincing argument that no Boolean semantic theory for conditionals can validate a very natural principle concerning the relationship between credences and conditionals. We argue that Bradley’s principle, Preservation, is, in fact, invalid; its appeal arises from the validity of a nearby, but distinct, principle, which we call Local Preservation, and which Boolean semantic theories can non-trivially validate.

This essay proposes a new theory of agentive modals: ability modals and their duals, compulsion modals. After criticizing existing approaches—the existential quantificational analysis, the universal quantificational analysis, and the conditional analysis—it presents a new account that builds on both the existential and conditional analyses. On this account, the act conditional analysis, a sentence like ‘John can swim across the river’ says that there is some practically available action that is such that if John tries to do it, he swims across (...) the river. The essay argues that the act conditional analysis avoids the problems faced by existing accounts of agentive modality and shows how the act conditional analysis can be extended to an account of generic agentive modal claims. The upshot is a new vantage point on the role of agentive modal ascriptions in practical discourse: ability ascriptions serve as a kind of hypothetical guarantee, and compulsion ascriptions as a kind of nonhypothetical guarantee. (shrink)

McGee argued that modus ponens was invalid for the natural language conditional ‘If…then…’. Many subsequent responses have argued that, while McGee’s examples show that modus ponens fails to preserve truth, they do not show that modus ponens fails to preserve rational full acceptance, and thus modus ponens may still be valid in the latter informational sense. I show that when we turn our attention from indicative conditionals to subjunctive conditionals, we find that modus ponens does not preserve either truth or (...) rational full acceptance, and thus is not valid in either sense. In concluding I briefly consider how we can account for these facts. (shrink)

Philippe Schlenker gives a method of deriving local contexts from an expression’s classical semantics. In this paper I show that this method, when applied to the traditional variably strict semantics for subjunctive conditionals of Robert Stalnaker, David Lewis, and Angelika Kratzer, delivers an empirically incorrect prediction. The prediction is that the antecedent of a conditional should have the whole domain of possible worlds as its local context and therefore should be allowed to have only necessary presuppositions. In the later part (...) of the paper, I suggest the outlines of a solution to the problem. The solution involves adding a shifting contextual restriction on the domain of possible worlds. (shrink)

A person of average height would assert a truth by the conditional ‘if I were seven feet tall, I would be taller than I am,’ in which an indicative clause ‘I am’ is embedded in a subjunctive conditional. By contrast, no one would assert a truth by ‘if I were seven feet tall, I would be taller than I would be’ or ‘if I am seven feet tall, I am taller than I am’. These examples exemplify the fact that whether (...) a sentence's evaluation remains at the actual world in the scope of a modal or conditional depends on the combination of mood in the embedded and matrix clauses rather than, as is commonly thought, just on the presence of an operator ‘actually’. This essay argues that this phenomenon provides evidence that mood admits of bound and free readings along the lines of tenses and pronouns. It therefore favors the hypothesis that natural language contains variables and quantifiers for possible worlds in the object language. This, in turn, requires that the truth of a semantic value of a sentence (or whatever structure is embedded in a modal) be relativized to a sequence of worlds rather than to an individual world, and thus be distinguished from a proposition in the traditional sense. The essay also compares the framework defended with an alternative account of similar phenomena by Kai Wehmeier. (shrink)

Some theories of conditionals maintain that the difference between indicative and subjunctive conditionals involves the standard temporal interpretation of past tense. I provide an argument against such theories. The argument is based on the claim that these views do not correctly predict the correspondence between tense marking and temporal interpretation in certain conditionals.

I argue that ‘actually’ does not have a reading according to which it is synonymous with the actuality operator of modal logic, and propose an alternative account of ‘actually’. The cases that have been thought to show that ‘actually’ is synonymous with the actuality operator are modal and counterfactual sentences in which an embedded clause's evaluation is held fixed at the world of the context. In these cases, though, this embedded clause's evaluation is not due to the presence of ‘actually’. (...) As an alternative, I propose that ‘actually’ is a presupposition trigger along the lines of ‘even’ or ‘too’, and it signals that presupposed information states in the discourse are evolving in a non-standard way. (shrink)

In two‐dimensional semantics in the tradition of Davies and Humberstone, whether a singular term receives an epistemically shifted reading in the scope of a modal operator depends on whether the world considered as actual is shifted. This means that epistemically shifted readings should be available only in environments where an explicit contrast between the actual world and some counterfactual worlds cannot be made. In this paper, I argue that this is incorrect. Whether a singular term receives an epistemically shifted reading (...) is independent of whether the world treated as actual is shifted. This, I argue, undermines the two‐dimensionalist account of epistemic shift. I then turn to the question how a positive view should handle these two phenomena separately. I argue for treating singular terms with a version of counterpart theory in which the difference between epistemically shifted and other readings is determined in the context of utterance. (shrink)

Philippe Schlenker gives a method of deriving local contexts from an expression’s classical semantics. In this paper I show that this method, when applied to the traditional variably strict semantics for subjunctive conditionals of Robert Stalnaker, David Lewis, and Angelika Kratzer, delivers an empirically incorrect prediction. The prediction is that the antecedent of a conditional should have the whole domain of possible worlds as its local context and therefore should be allowed to have only necessary presuppositions. In the later part (...) of the paper, I suggest the outlines of a solution to the problem. The solution involves adding a shifting contextual restriction on the domain of possible worlds. (shrink)

In this paper, I show that, given seemingly plausible assumptions about the epistemic ‘might’ and conditionals, we cannot explain why in some circumstances it is appropriate to utter conditional ‘might’-sentences, like “If Angelica has crumbs in her pocket, then she might be the thief” and not the corresponding simple ones, like “Angelica might be the thief.” So, one of our assumptions must be incorrect. I argue that the root of the problem is an umbrella thesis about the pragmatics of ‘might’-communication (...) - one that says that the communicative impact of an utterance of a ‘might’-sentence is the performance of a consistency check on the information of the context. I conclude that we must reject this thesis. And I close the paper by sketching an alternative view about what assertive uses of ‘might’-sentences typically do - one which avoids the problem. Such uses typically present a possibility as a serious option in reasoning and deliberation. (shrink)