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Epistemic modals and context: Experimental data

Paper · 2014 · Joshua Knobe and Seth Yalcin

Summary

Relativist theories of epistemic modals, notably Egan (2007) and MacFarlane (2011), rest partly on an empirical claim the authors call (J). According to (J), people count a bare present-tense "might" claim as true only when its prejacent fits what they themselves know, even when someone else made the claim. The literature disagreed on whether speakers actually judge this way, so Knobe and Yalcin tested it with vignette experiments. They used two kinds of scenario: eavesdropping (extracontextual assessment) cases and retraction cases. One example is the Fat Tony story, in which an expert says Tony might be dead while he is in fact alive. Across four experiments, participants did not call such claims false. They leaned toward judging them true, even when the story included an eavesdropper with better evidence. Participants did favour retraction once the prejacent proved false. However, a design that separated retraction from falsity showed that the two judgments come apart. The result undercuts arguments from (J) to relativism, though not relativism itself. It also suggests that retraction undoes a conversational update rather than admitting a falsehood.

Key points

  • The paper frames three theses. (R) says epistemic modals need relativist truth or content. (J) is the empirical judgment claim. Claims (1) and (2) say that extracontextual assessors do not judge the "might" claim true, and do judge it false.
  • There were four experiments:
    • Exp. 1: readers assess a claim whose prejacent is known to be false.
    • Exp. 2: an eavesdropper who knows more than the speaker.
    • Exp. 3: retraction judgments.
    • Exp. 4: retraction judgments separated from falsity judgments.
  • Exp. 4 crossed statement type (modal vs. nonmodal) with question type (retraction vs. falsity). It was analysed with ordinal regression:
    • statement type: b = 0.9, p < .05;
    • question type: b = −1.9, p < .001;
    • interaction: b = 1.9, p < .01.
  • Five non-native English speakers were excluded from the Exp. 4 analyses. Some comparisons used Mann-Whitney U tests, with one null result (p = .84) and two at p < .001.
  • Stephenson (2007a) is acknowledged as defending (R) on grounds other than (J), so it falls outside the critique.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Cross a modal vs. nonmodal minimal pair with two question types to check whether an effect is specific to the modal or general to any statement; the interaction term is what reveals the difference.
  • I2. Retraction can be modelled as withdrawing a conversational update from the common ground rather than declaring a statement false, which also covers commands, questions and expressives.
  • I3. A "might P" claim mainly leaves the context open to P, so its correctness can survive P later turning out false.
  • I4. Truth judgments depend on who is assessing: a better-informed listener need not count a cautious earlier claim as wrong.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Evaluation suites can pair each modal or hedged test item with a nonmodal twin as a negative control, exposing rules that fire on surface cues rather than on modality.
  • I2 (frames): The speech-act layer in prag could represent "take back" acts as undoing a prior act's update, uniformly across act types, rather than as negating propositions.
  • I3 (world): The world model can store "might P" as an open possibility tied to the speaker and time, then close it when P is refuted, without marking the original utterance as false.
  • I4 (answer): For QA on tales where the reader knows more than a character (as in Fat Tony), the reader should distinguish "P was false" from "the character's hedge was wrong" and explain the difference.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of California, BerkeleyBerkeley · United States127 works · 212,523 citations🎓Yale UniversityNew Haven · United States54 works · 11,964 citations

📚 Shelves 5 Computer Science · 9,086 works Artificial Intelligence · 8,889 works Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Language and Linguistics · 9,206 works Philosophy · 211 works

Cite

Cite as Joshua Knobe and Seth Yalcin. 2014. Epistemic modals and context: Experimental data. Semantics and Pragmatics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.7.10

@article{knobe2014epistemic,
  title = {{Epistemic modals and context: Experimental data}},
  author = {Joshua Knobe and Seth Yalcin},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.7.10},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.7.10}
}

References

31 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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