Contextualism and relativism

The following review explores Intercultural Information Ethics (IIE) in terms of comparative philosophy, supporting IIE as the most relevant and significant development of the field of Information Ethics (IE). The focus of the review is threefold. First, it will review the core presumption of the field of IIE, that being the demand for an inter- mission in the pursuit of a founding philosophy for IE in order to first address the philosophical biases of IE by western philosophy. Second, a history of the various philosophical streams of IIE will be outlined, including its literature and pioneering contributors. Lastly, a new synthesis of comparative philosophies in IIE will be offered, looking towards a future evolution of the field. Examining the interchange between contemporary information ethicists regarding the discipline of IIE, the review first outlines the previously established presumptions of the field of IIE that posit the need for an IE as grounded in western sensibilities. The author then addresses the implications of the foregoing presumption from several non-western viewpoints, arguing that IIE does in fact find roots in non-western philosophies as established in the concluding synthesis of western and eastern philosophical traditions.

Case studies in postcolonial contextualization mark a forty-year-old missiolog-ical trend in evangelical scholarship. The largely unqualified support of indigenous theological expression by mission theorists represents an epistemological shift from a conservative bibliology toward felt-needs evangelization and religious roundtable dialogue methods. Evangelical contextualization theory today echoes German Ro-manticism's early assessments of indigenous language and local religion, especially as seen in the works of pluralistic Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). No study of postcolonial contextualization is complete without considering the enduring influence of Herder's " vernacular consciousness " on the current missiological mindset.

In contemporary philosophy and social science the features of rationality play a new significant role in the theory of mind, language, action, decision theory and in questions of cross cultural understanding. The approaches do not conceive of rationality as a subjective a priori principle of reasoning; they present a different attitude towards questions of conceptualizing rationality, and this is a first step towards contextualized understanding of rationality. We can only grasp what rationality means in this way. Rationality is not given but is rather a result of our conceptualizing and a matter of contextualization and this is also a question of rationalization of means for our personal and our collective goals. The reader presents an outline on contemporary orientations about the subject of understanding "rationality" along the main topics in philosophy, theory of language, and social science. Topics are radical interpretation, naturalized epistemology and normativity; intentions and the social aspects of rationality; and concepts of explanation, justification and reality.

Research Articles
Dionysis CHRISTIAS, A Critical Examination of BonJour’s, Haack’s, and Dancy’s Theory of Empirical Justification
Robert HUDSON, Defending Standards Contextualism
Kevin McCAIN, Interventionism Defended 
Mihai RUSU, On the Epistemology of Modal Rationalism: The Main Problems and Their Significance
Ju WANG, Davidsonian Response to Radical Scepticism

Discussion Notes/Debate
Brent ABLES, Disagreement and Philosophical Progress
Muralidharan ANANTHARAMAN, Defending the Uniqueness Thesis: A Reply to Luis Rosa 
Erik J. WIELENBERG, Difference-Making and Easy Knowledge: Reply to Comesaña and Sartorio

In this entry, I tackle the phenomenon known as "faultless disagreement", considered by many authors to pose a challenge to the main views on the semantics of subjective expressions. I first present the phenomenon and the challenge, then review the main answers given by contextualist, absolutist and relativist approaches to the expressions in question. I end with signaling two issues that might shape future discussions about the role played by faultless disagreement in semantics.

Certain passages in Kaplan’s ‘Demonstratives’ are often taken to show that non-vacuous sentential operators associated with a certain parameter of sentential truth require a corresponding relativism concerning assertoric contents: namely, their truth-values also must vary with that parameter. Thus, for example, the non-vacuity of a temporal sentential operator ‘always’ would require some of its operands to have contents that have different truth values at different times. While making no claims about Kaplan’s intentions, we provide several reconstructions of how such an argument might go, focusing on the case of time and temporal operators as an illustration. What we regard as the most plausible reconstruction of the argument establishes a conclusion similar enough to that attributed to Kaplan. However, the argument overgenerates, leading to absurd con- sequences. We conclude that we must distinguish assertoric contents from compositional semantic values, and argue that once they are distinguished, the argument fails to establish any substantial conclusions. We also briefly discuss a related argument commonly attributed to Lewis, and a recent variant due to Weber.

This thesis is a defense of the view that reality is relative. First I start with semantic relativism, then, I show that semantic relativism implies reality relativism. To argue for semantic relativism, motivated by arguments by W.V. O. Quine and L. Wittgenstein, I use two examples about personal identity. The first one is about abortion and the second one is about brain transplantation cases. Next, I show that if meaning is relative then whatever we call reality is also relative since our access to reality is through language. After my arguments, I consider two objections. The first one is David Lewis’ objection. Lewis claims that due to the natural structure of the world words tend to refer to some objects (or set of objects) as opposed to others. Hence, he argues against the semantic relativity thesis. The second objection is that relativism is self-refuting because it relativizes itself. I reply to both objections.

The main goal in this paper is to outline and defend a form of Relativism, under which truth is absolute but assertibility is not. I dub such a view Norm-Relativism in contrast to the more familiar forms of Truth-Relativism. The key feature of this view is that just what norm of assertion, belief, and action is in play in some context is itself relative to a perspective. In slogan form: there is no fixed, single norm for assertion, belief, and action. Upshot: 'knows' is neither context-sensitive nor perspectival.

The paper focuses on legal predicates (‘constitutional’, ‘obligatory’, etc.) and their so-called faultless disagreement effects. The authors argue that among such predicates, ‘binding’ presents a novel challenge even for semantic theories that have recently been put forth, or construed, to deal with faultless disagreement in areas of discourse dwelling on matters of taste, aesthetics, ethics and knowledge. After putting a number of such theories to test, they find two styles of solution. The paper thus serves a twofold aim of addressing both semanticists and legal theorists. On the one hand, it introduces in the literature on faultless disagreement a fresh bone to bite on. On the other hand, it critically discriminates between various semantic models that have been understood so far as having a particular appeal for lawyers.

The paper gives an analysis of sentences with predicates of personal taste and epistemic modals in terms of generic simulation. It arguing that such sentences involve first-person-based genericity and thus the very same semantics as sentences with generic 'one'.

This paper argue that two kinds of first-person-oriented content are distinguished in more ways than usually thought. The first kind consists of contents of attitudes de se (in a broad sense); the second kind consists of contents that give rise to intuitions of relative truth. the paper presents new data concerning the two kinds of first-person-oriented content, together with a novel account of propositional content in general, namely based on the notion of an attitudinal object. That notion solves two major problems with Lewis’s account of contents of attitudes de se and clarifies the difference between contents of attitudes de se and contents that give rise to intuitions of relative truth. The latter are analysed in terms of generic simulation, leading to 'first-person-based genericity'.

Steven Katz in 1978 changed how the Academy analyzed mystical experience. This was an important achievement and brought the study to new depths. However, he also created a false description of human experience and many have attempted to challenge him.
'Let me state the single epistemological assumption that has exercised my thinking…There are no pure (i.e. unmediated) experiences. '
A simple statement that was flawed the moment it was made.
This paper will in greater detail than my prior paper on Katz,[RE: article dealing with Donald Evan's challenge to Katz],  ,disclose the flaw in the logic structure of that statement. It will demonstrate why it can not be accept as valid on its face.
This paper will offer a defensible alternative to his assertion concerning experience. One that has implications for the study of mysticism.

The Protestant missionary movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries has for some time now come under severe criticism both by many Western scholars and an increasing number of their African peers. Missionaries are charged with displacing indigenous cultures and supporting the political and economic colonisation on the African continent and other parts of the world. They were driven by an attitude of spiritual and ethno-cultural superiority, so the critics claim.

In this paper, I will trace a distinction between two different ways of thinking about doxastic conflicts. The first way emphasises what is going on at the level of semantics, when two subjects disagree by uttering certain sentences or accepting certain contents. The second way emphasises some aspects that are epistemic in kind, which concern what subjects are rationally required to do whenever they disagree with someone. The semantics-oriented and epistemically-oriented notions will serve for the purpose of assessing some aspects of the debate that revolves around the notions of disagreement on matters of inclination. These aspects include: (i) the idea that disagreements in areas of inclination are somehow defective (Egan 2010); (ii) the idea that Relativism makes disagreement epistemically insignificant (Carter 2013); (iii) the idea that there can be faultless disagreements in which faultlessness is epistemic in kind (Schafer 2011).

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the philosophy language over the merits, limits and future perspectives of approaches to the problem of meaning and communication that focus on the role of linguistic context. However, a noticeable problem that has been pivotal in motivating some developments of this trend has been so far under-explored. The problem in a nutshell is: what's the nature of disagreement? Given that linguistic disagreement data has been recently advanced as one of the main motivations for some of these contextual approaches in relation to the so-called phenomenon of "faultless disagreement", the intellectual pressure to answer this question has accordingly increased. The aim of this paper is to show that a very natural and intuitive notion of disagreement cannot but lead to criticizing these proposals as positive philosophical explanations of faultless disagreement. We shed light on the difference between different philosophical projects that, we think, in the current debate on faultless disagreement have not been properly kept distinct using the distinctions normative Vs empirical projects and descriptive Vs revisionary projects. Our conclusion is conditional: if the natural and intuitive view of disagreement is correct, then many of the approaches to faultless disagreement that make use of the notion of context cannot offer a descriptive philosophical explanation of faultless disagreement.

In the debate between contextualism and relativism about predicates of taste, the challenge from disagreement (the objection that contextualism cannot account for disagreement in ordinary exchanges involving such predicates) has played a central role. This paper investigates one way of answering the challenge consisting on appeal to certain, less focused on, uses of predicates of taste. It argues that the said thread is unsatisfactory, in that it downplays certain exchanges that constitute the core disagreement data. Additionally, several arguments to the effect that the exchanges in question don’t amount to disagreement are considered and rejected.

Introduction

by Ernest Lepore and Yi Jiang

It is our great pleasure to introduce this volume of essays, which represent (in our modest opinion) the beginning of an era of Chinese and English language philosophical cooperation. The Chinese philosophical tradition and the Western philosophical tradition (starting with the Ancient Greeks) have often been considered orthogonal to each other – two ships passing in the night without much to say to each other. Whatever the merits of this thesis, we believe that recent developments in the Anglo-American philosophy and Chinese philosophy of language not only suggest a tableau of shared problems, but also a number of similar methods and goals. It is the goal of this volume to juxtapose these recent philosophical developments to illustrate the similarities between the traditions, but also to spur common dialogue and hopefully efforts to jointly engage shared philosophical problems.

The essays in this volume (by contributors from the United States, Great Britain, Australia and China) address issues about language and value from philosophical perspectives that overlap in surprising ways. The issues engaged range from the role of cultural and biological factors in linguistic competence and language use, to figurative speech in different languages, the comparative study of work in semantics and philosophy, and the role of language in establishing the legal and ethical norms and values. 

This volume represents the first substantial collaborative work from Chinese and Western scholars on philosophy of language. Although there has previously been some collaboration between Chinese and English language academics, there has never been a contemporary philosophical collection of this design, where each essay appears in both Chinese and English, and the two versions are presented side by side. It is our hope that by this endeavor we will be able to encourage greater collaborations among scholars both in China and in the English-speaking world.  Our mission is to provide a bridge between traditions, leading to mutual understanding, philosophical collaboration, and ultimately a level of philosophical progress that could not be achieved were we working separately. We believe there is much to be gained by our working together in such an enterprise.

To this end, in addition to assembling the essays in this volume, we paired each contributor from China with an English speaking philosopher; the paired philosophers read, edited and commented on each others work.  The philosophers were thus able to rewrite their papers with the help of advice from a fresh perspective. In some cases this led to the introduction of arguments and moves that had not previously been considered; in other cases it led to a better handle on how the ideas should be presented – it opened the ideas to a broader philosophical audience.  We believe that this has made for a compelling, globally accessible, and yes revolutionary new body of philosophical work.

The Chinese philosophers who have contributed represent a broad spectrum of the current academic world in China.

CHEN Bo is a professor of Philosophy at Peking University. He is one of most distinguished scholars in logic and analytic philosophy in China. He has published several essays in top journals in A&HCI list. His interests are philosophy of logic, Quine's philosophy, and philosophy of language.

Professor JIANG Yi of the School of Philosophy and Sociology, at Beijing Normal University,  is one of most distinguished scholars in analytic philosophy and philosophy of language in China. He has published several books in Chinese on Wittgenstein and analytic philosophy. His interests are analytic philosophy, philosophy of language and Wittgenstein.

Professor LIU Limin, of School of Foreign Languages, is at Sichuan University. His interests are philosophy of language and linguistics.

Professor QIAN Guanlian, of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, has for some time now been a important and distinguished scholars in pragmatics and the philosophy of language. He has published several books in Chinese on pragmatics.

YUGUO Fei, is a member of the Philosophy of Department at Yunnan University in Kunming. He received his PhD from Wuhan University, and his chief interests include logic and philosophy of language.

WANG Aihua is an Associate Professor of School of Foreign Language, at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu. Her interests are also in pragmatics and philosophy of language.

ZHANG Ying, of Philosophy Department, at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, received her PhD from Sun Yat-sen University. She was a visiting professor at Rutgers for two years, and her chiefs interests are the philosophy of language, logic and pragmatics.

Lastly, Professor ZHU Zhifang, of Philosophy Department, at Wuhan University. He is one of more distinguished scholars in analytic philosophy and logic in China. He has published several books and essays in logic and philosophy of language. His interests are logic, philosophy of language and semiotics.

From the English speaking community our volume includes previously unpublished papers by a number of distinguished theorists of language.

Adam SENNET,  an Associate Professor, Dept. of Philosophy, UC Davis, specializes in the philosophy of language and has published papers in Mind and Language, Philosophical Studies, and the Journal of Philosophical Logic. 

Samuel CUMMING, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, UCLA, has interests in the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, semantics and pragmatics.

Peter LUDLOW is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. He has published on topics ranging from the philosophy of linguistics to the metaphysics of time. His current interests include the dynamics of communication (including the dynamics of the lexicon) and the optimization of group knowledge in adversarial environments.

Christopher HOM, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Texas Tech University.  He earned his PhD from the University of California, Irvine (LPS).  His research interests are in philosophy of language, metaethics, and philosophy of race.  He has published articles on racial slurs and normative language generally.

Paul PIETROSKI, Professor of Linguistics and Professor of Philosophy, University of Maryland. His research interests are focused on how linguistic meaning is related to human psychology.

Robert MAY is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of California, Davis.  He is the author of Logical Form:  Its Structure and Derivation,and with Robert Fiengo of Anaphora and Identity and De Lingua Belief.  He is well-known for his work in the syntax and semantics of natural language, especially on natural language quantification, and has written extensively on Frege, along with other topics in philosophy of language and philosophy of logic.

William STARR, Assistant Professor at the Sage School of Philosophy, Cornell University. His research is on communication and cognition, drawing on ideas across philosophy, linguistics, logic, artificial intelligence and psychology. His published work explores these themes through various linguistic phenomena including conditionals, questions, imperatives, modality and speech acts.

Matthew STONE completed his Ph.D. in the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania in 1998.  Since then he has had an appointment in the Computer Science Department and Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.  Stone has had visiting positions at the University of Edinburgh and the Universität Potsdam.  He works on problems of meaning in human-human and human-computer conversation.

Barry C SMITH is a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute of Philosophy in the School of Advanced Study, University of London, where he co-directs the Centre for the Study of the Senses. He has written mostly on the philosophy of mind and language, on the topics of self-knowledge and our knowledge of language. He co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language (2006) with Ernest Lepore. Following his 2007 collection, Questions of Taste - the philosophy of wine (Oxford University Press), he began working with psychologists, neurologists and neuroscientists on flavour perception and is now the co-organiser of an international research project on the Nature of Taste. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley and at the Ecole Normale Supèriere, and was the writer and presenter of the BBC World Service radio series, The Mysteries of the Brain. 

Ernest Lepore is the Director of the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University and a Professor of philosophy. His chief interests are philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.

ABSTRACT
In our globalized World, the inter–cultural relations have increased and have also become more intricate. This globalization is an essential characteristic in today’s multiculturalism as the coexistence of different cultures in the same society and in the structure of these societies, due to migration or secularization, among other reasons.
In this context, the two main errors (relativism and legal positivism) that influence the correct interpretation of multiculturalism are explained here. Secondly, here is also explained the main characteristics of Culture (its social and historical role, and its relative –and not relativistic– nature; and also the relation between Culture and Moral). Thus, we may better understand the meaning of otherness or alterity (from alter or the other, in Latin) or the acknowledgement of the other, an essential element in the construction of an intercultural understanding that, in the future, may help make the coexistence of individuals and communities easier.

This paper was presented at the I Conference in History at the Instituto de Humanidades CEU Ángel Ayala. This Conference took place in the University CEU San Pablo between the 26 and the 27 January 2005.

KEYWORDS
Alliance of Civilizations
Clash of Civilizations
Cultural Relativism
Cultural Theory
Intercultural Competence
Intercultural Relations
Multiculturalism
Otherness

RESUMEN
En el mundo globalizado actual, las relaciones interculturales se han multiplicado y vuelto cada vez más complejas. Especialmente en la medida en que el multiculturalismo, entendido como la coexistencia de distintas culturas en una misma sociedad, constituye un rasgo estructural del presente debido a fenómenos como la inmigración, la secularización y otros.
En ese contexto, se exponen aquí en primer lugar los dos errores más difundidos en relación con el contacto intercultural (el relativismo y el positivismo jurídico). Tras ello se presentan los rasgos fundamentales de la cultura (su carácter social e histórico, su carácter relativo –que no relativista– y la relación entre cultura y moral), de manera que podamos entender mejor el significado de la alteridad (el reconocimiento del “otro”), elemento clave para poder construir una esquema de competencia intercultural que facilite la convivencia entre individuos y pueblos

Este texto se corresponde con la comunicación del mismo título presentada en las I Jornadas de Historia del Instituto CEU de Humanidades Ángel Ayala, celebradas en la Universidad CEU San Pablo los días 26 y 27 de enero de 2005.

PALABRAS CLAVE
Alianza de civilizaciones
Alteridad
Choque de civilizaciones
Competencia intercultural
Multiculturalismo
Otredad
Relación intercultural
Relativismo cultural
Teoría de la cultura

Against traditional contextualism and relativism based on Kaplan (1989) it is argued that parameter-based double-index modal logic is not very suitable for modeling nonindexical context-dependence. Instead, we need to take a look at interpretation as an inference based on the literal meaning (=what can be derived from the lexicon) of an utterance and a rich background ontology involving defeasible rules.

Recently, contextualism about epistemic modals and predicates of taste have come under fire from advocates of assessment relativistic analyses. Contextualism, they have argued, fails to account for what we call "felicitous insensitive assessments". In this paper, we provide one hitherto overlooked way in which contextualists can embrace the phenomenon by slightly modifying an assumption that has remained in the background in most of the debate over contextualism and relativism. Finally, we briefly argue that the resulting contextualist account is at least as plausible as the relativist alternative and should be carefully considered before contextualism is abandoned for relativism.

In this short paper I survey recent contextualist answers to the challenge from disagreement raised by contemporary relativists. After making the challenge vivid by means of a working example, I specify the notion of disagreement lying at the heart of the challenge. The answers are grouped in three categories, the first characterized by rejecting the intuition of disagreement in certain cases, the second by conceiving disagreement as a clash of non-cognitive attitudes and the third by relegating disagreement at the pragmatic level. For each category I present several important variants and raise some (general) criticisms. The paper is meant to offer a quick introduction to the current contextualist literature on disagreement and thus a useful tool for further research.

In this paper we discuss a phenomenon we call perspectival plurality, which has gone largely unnoticed in the current debate between relativism and contextualism about predicates of personal taste (PPTs). According to perspectival plurality, the truth value of a sentence containing more than one PPT may depend on more than one perspective (subjects, experiencers or judges). Prima facie, the phenomenon engenders a problem for relativism and can be shaped into an argument in favor of contextualism. We explore the consequences of perspectival plurality in depth and assess several possible responses on behalf of advocates of relativism.

An account of assertion along truth-relativistic lines is offered. The main lines of relativism about truth are laid out and the problematic features that assertion acquires in the presence of relative truth are identified. These features are the possibility of coherently formulating norms of assertion and the possibility of grounding a rational practice of assertion upon relative truth. A solution to these problems is provided by formulating norms for making and assessing assertions that employ a suitably relativized truth predicate and a perspectival notion of correctness. Two potential objections to this proposal are addressed.

Focusing on predicates of taste, this paper puts forward a novel version of relativism, motivated by a recently discussed phenomenon: perspectival plurality. After showing that the phenomenon is problematic for at least some versions of relativism and discussing several possible answers on behalf of the relativist, I put forward my own version. The main feature of the proposal is the introduction in the index not of a single parameter for perspectives, but of a (possibly infinite) sequence of such parameters. In the last part of the paper, I defend the view from three objections.

According to epistemological contextualism, a sentence of the form "S knows that p" doesn't express a complete proposition. Different utterances of the sentence, in different contexts, can express different propositions: "know" is context-dependent. This paper deals with the semantic contextualist thesis grounding epistemological contextualism. We examine various kinds of linguistic context dependence, which could be relevant to epistemological contextualism: ambiguity, ellipsis, indexicality, context-sensitivity of scalar predicates, dependence on standards of precision. We argue that only an accurate analysis of the different varieties of context sensitivity secures us a better understanding and a clearer evaluation of the contextualist approach.

It is sometimes argued that contextualism cannot explain (dis)agreements concerning matters of personal taste because it treats sentences involving predicates of taste as indexical. I aim to weaken this charge. Given the idea that people sometimes use indexical sentences to express (dis)agreements about taste, two kinds of (dis)agreement are distinguished, namely doxastic and non-doxastic. Taste (dis)agreements are better explained in terms of the later kind, in which case they become amenable to contextualist treatment. It is argued that if something instantiates a taste property (like being tasty for A), it has to instantiate a corresponding attitudinal property (like being liked by A). Based on this, utterances of taste sentences express propositions that concern tastiness of something (e.g., that X is tasty for A) and these propositions entail other propositions that concern non-doxastic attitudes the speakers bear toward something (e.g., that X is liked by A). One speaker is claimed to (dis)agree with another speaker provided their respective entailed propositions feature (in)compatible non-doxastic attitudes. Although this explanation is similar to hybrid accounts that are currently growing in popularity, it departs from them in some notable respects.

Innovative modes of collaborative practice are transforming archaeology; descent communities and archaeologists jointly define the research agenda and pursue programs of historical, archaeological inquiry together, sometimes bringing strikingly different conceptual schemes and methodologies to bear on questions of common concern. The tolerance of epistemic pluralism necessary for such practice has attracted sharp critiques from skeptics – philosophers (e.g., Boghossian in Fear of Knowledge, 2006) as well as archaeologists – who decry the compromises they believe it entails for properly scientific inquiry conceived in terms of the traditional ideal that science, proper, should be value free. By contrast, I contend that these collaborations can and often do significantly improve archaeological practice empirically, conceptually, and methodologically. I argue that when these projects succeed they illustrate the virtues of extending the cognitive-social norms of Longino’s proceduralist account of objectivity – specifically, her “tempered equality of intellectual authority” – beyond the confines of the scientific community (2002, 128-135). In the process, I identify the diversity of pluralisms that are a source of creative insight in these projects and I make the case that critics who fear this pluralism misrecognize the complexity of and contingency of the epistemic norms they defend.

The present paper has two goals. The simpler one is to weaken one of John MacFarlane's main motivations behind semantic relativism. The second, but more fundamental aim is to show that there are fundamental similarities between the aforementioned two philosophical debates. Such is the similarity between these two debates, that one can easily take almost any argument from the former debate, change some terms, adapt the examples, and end up with an argument relevant to the latter. Actually, that is what I plan to do in the second half of the paper: take a well known argument against moral luck, and turn it into an argument against relativism.

I assume a central thesis about Modal Auxiliaries due to Kratzer, roughly as follows:
THE MODAL BASE PRESUPPOSITION: Natural language expressions that contain a modal component in their meaning, including all English modal auxiliaries and Epistemic Modal Auxiliaries (EMA)s in particular, presuppose a modal base, a function that draws from context a relevant set of propositions which contribute to a premise-semantics for the modal.
Accepting this thesis for EMAs leaves open (at least) the following two questions about the meaning of English EMAs like must and might:
i. What constraints, if any, are there on the character of the premise set for an EMA?
ii. What is the nature of the relationship between premises and conclusion that is required for truth of the EMA statement?

I argue for at least a partial answer to (i), with two hypotheses about constraints on the modal base for an EMA:
EVIDENTIALITY: The modal base for an EMA is evidential and doxastic, not truly epistemic. Thus, an EMA is weak, not strong, pace von Fintel & Gillies (.2010).
INDEXICALITY: EMAs, unlike some other types of modals, are indexical: They are anchored to an agent-at-a-time whose doxastic state is currently under discussion in the context of utterance.
These constraints are modeled as presuppositions triggered by the EMA, restrictions on the modal base which will determine the modal’s domain. The indexical anchoring (a) correctly predicts the contextually limited range of candidates for the anchoring agent of such a modal, as attested in the literature, and (b) thereby constrains what body of evidence is understood to be relevant (that of the anchor). The account sheds light on several puzzles, including (c) purported arguments for modal relativism (e.g., Egan, Hawthorne & Weatherson 2005), and (d) Yalcin’s (2007) version of Moore’s paradox for embedded epistemic modals.