This week, Daniel Rothschild (University College London, Philosophy) will be presenting a new approach to the ‘it might be raining’ problem.

Speaker: Daniel Rothschild
Title: ‘Epistemic Contradictions’
Date: Friday 5/2
Time: 11:30 to 1:20
Location: Social Sciences 401

We look forward to seeing you there!

Abstract:

Yalcin (2007) argued that the infelicity of epistemic contradictions, such as ‘It might be raining but it’s not raining’, cannot be accounted for with the normal pragmatic resources used to handle Moorean paradoxes. To explain the infelicity of epistemic contradictions, Yalcin gave a non-standard semantics for epistemic modals that is in most respects equivalent to Veltman’s (1996) dynamic update semantics. I will show that neither Yalcin nor Veltman’s semantics is adequate to deal with the problem of epistemic contradictions. I present a semantics that can account for them and discuss its implications for the dynamic view of meaning.