Modality in flux

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2010-05

Authors

Willer, Malte

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Abstract

I develop a novel semantic theory for modals that has important consequences for contemporary work in epistemology, metaphysics and ethics. My theory replaces the dominant view about semantics--that our best theory of meaning should ascribe truth-conditions to modalized sentences--with a non-truth-conditional yet fully compositional semantics for modals. Its contributions to current debates in analytic philosophy include an explanation of the possibility of modal disagreement that avoids relativism, a solution to the paradoxes about conditional obligations (including the gentle murder paradox), and new impulses for a generalized solution to the Frege-Geach problem for noncognitivism.

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