Andy Egan & Brian Weatherson (eds.) Epistemic Modality, Oxford University Press, 2011, 320 pp., $35.00, ISBN 9780199591589.

The papers in Epistemic Modality together center around two

questions:

1. How should we represent the most philosophically usefulnotion of epistemic possibility?

2. What is the best semantics for epistemic modal expressions in English? Do declarative sentences containing them have truth conditions? If so, what arethose conditions and what is required for them to be met? If not, how should we understand the contribution the use of such sentences makes to a conversation?

Epistemic Modality is a must read for anyone interested in

either of these questions or related issues. Each of the

papers represents an important contribution to the recent

literature on one of these topics. The contributions by

David Chalmers and Frank Jackson each address the first

question, while the papers by Kent Bach, Kai von Fintel and

Anthony Gillies, John MacFarlane, Jonathan Schaffer, Eric

Swanson, Stephen Yablo, and Seth Yalcin each address the

second. Robert Stalnaker’s paper doesn’t directly address,

but is related to issues concerning the first. Space

constraints prevent me from doing justice to any of these

1

works. Instead, I will focus this review on a theme shared

by almost all of the papers addressing the second question.

Aside from Schaffer’s paper, each of the papers in this

group argues that Angelika Kratzer’s canonical contextualist

semantics for epistemic modal expressions is in need of

revision. If correct, this would be an important

development. These authors disagree about what view should

replace Kratzer’s account and the concerns with the canon

raised by some of the authors are unique. But there’s also

a good deal of overlapping agreement about what the main

challenges to the canon are. Showing that the canon is in

need of revision promises to be the single greatest

contribution of the volume as a whole. I’ll focus, then, on

assessing these challenges. Towards the end of this review,

I’ll briefly discuss the positive semantic proposals of

Schaffer and Bach and discuss the papers addressing the

first question. (NB: Numbers in parentheses refer to page

numbers in the paperback edition.)

As von Fintel and Gillies note (108), the canonical

semantics for epistemic modals is contextualist. On that

2

view, modal expressions are quantifiers over possibilities

whose domains are restricted as a function of context. In

the case of epistemic modals, the information available to a

group relevant at the context of utterance determines their

domains. It’s worth remembering a central reason this is

the canonical view. In giving a unified semantics for all

our modal expressions, it offers a simple, power explanation

of a wide range of language use. Accepting any of the

revisionary proposals will mean giving up, to greater and

lesser extents, on the unity of the modals. Greater

departures from the canon, such as expressivism and

relativism, absent a demonstration that contextualism about

other modals must be given up, too, will be forced to hold

that learning modal expressions in English is much more

complicated than linguists had previous reason to think.

This theoretical cost puts great weight on the

challenges to contextualism. Only if there is no plausible

contextualist account that can meet them is there reason to

accept any of these revisionary proposals. If there is an

empirically adequate contextualist view, its unity will give

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it an important theoretical advantage over any rival. One

way of assessing the conclusions of these papers as a group,

then, is to assess the strength of the shared putative

challenges to contextualism.

Together, the authors identify a number of such

challenges. I’ll focus on seven of them pressed by more

than one author.

Imagine that Alex is helping her roommate Billy look for

her keys. It’s fine for Alex to say,

(C) “You might have left them in the car”

and also fine for Billy to reply,

(N) “No; I still had them when we came into the house”.

Which body of information should the contextualist hold is

selected as the domain determining one for (C) in order to

make sense of Billy’s (N)? In such cases, several authors

suggest, it isn’t plausibly the speaker’s, since there is no

reason for Billy to take issue with the claim that it’s

compatible with Alex’s information that the keys are in the

car (Egan and Weatherson (7-8), MacFarlane (148-9), Yalcin

4

(302-3)). This is the Challenge from Disagreement, a challenge

to Solipsistic Contextualism, the view that context always

selects the speaker’s information (MacFarlane, 148). But

suppose that the contextualist holds that it’s the group’s

information, Alex’s and Billy’s together, which is selected?

In that case, several of the authors suggest, Alex’s

original assertion won’t be warranted, since nothing in the

case mandates that Alex knows what’s compatible with the

information they have together. Putting together the

felicity of both Alex’s original assertion and Billy’s reply

yields the Challenge from Contextual Instability (von Fintel and

Gillies (114-116) and Swanson (261-62). (For similar

challenges, see also MacFarlane (151-52) and Yablo (271-

72)). It looks like the contextualist needs to hold that

the solipsistic reading is the favored one, to account for

the felicity of the former, and also that the group reading

is favored, to account for the felicity of the latter. But

both cannot be favored. So, the canonical view needs to be

revised in some way.

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Call the above case “KEYS”. In his paper, MacFarlane

argues that the best way to make sense of cases like KEYS is

to hold that epistemic modal sentences are semantically

invariant, expressing the same proposition in all contexts

of use, but have truth-values that shift with shifting

contexts of assessment. What accounts for the difference in

truth-value at different contexts of assessment is a

difference in the body of information that is relevant for

assessing the proposition’s truth. On the resulting,

relativist view, what Alex says is warranted because it’s

true at her context of assessment and its true at her

context of assessment because the information relevant at

that context is the information she has at the time of her

utterance (since the former context is identical to the

latter). What Billy says, (N), is also warranted because

it’s his information that’s relevant at his context of

assessment and, relative to that information, what Alex says

in (C) is false.

Von Fintel and Gillies defend a less revisionary,

different response to the KEYS data. That data, they

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suggest, doesn’t show that contextualism needs giving up, only

its canonical version. The trick is to find a way to make

both favored readings available at a context of use. Cloudy

contextualism is the view we get by accepting this minimal

change to the canon. According to cloudy contextualists,

the typical use of a bare, epistemic modal sentence involves

underdetermination. Instead of asserting a single,

determinate proposition, as on the canonical view, a speaker

typically ‘puts into play’ a ‘cloud of propositions’. Those

put into play will be all of the ‘available’ readings of her

sentence at her context of use (117-18). It’s not clear

what makes a reading an ‘available’ one, on their view, but

it’s clear that they take at least the solipsistic and the

group readings to be among those put into play by Alex with

(C) (117). A speaker is warranted in saying what she does

just in case she is warranted in asserting at least one in

the cloud of propositions she has put into play. And an

addressee is warranted in responding as she does, just in

case she is warranted in accepting/rejecting the strongest

proposition the speaker has put into play that she

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“reasonably has an opinion about” (121). So, in KEYS, both

Alex and Billy are warranted in saying what they do.

Elsewhere I argue that getting clear on the KEYS data

shows that not even this minimal change to the canon is

required for contextualism to fit with that data.

Distinguishing different ways of filling out KEYS shows that

there is no single case for which competent speakers

uniformly have a strong intuition that both solipsistic and

group readings must be available. This is enough to diffuse

the challenge.1

The above Challenge from Disagreement is related to the

Challenge from Third Party Assessments (MacFarlane 146)2. In the

above case, Alex and Billy are part of a single

conversation. But what about third party assessments of

what a speaker has said? In these cases, the assessor is

not herself party to the conversation in which the assessed

utterance occurs. These include the much-discussed

eavesdropper cases. Suppose while standing in the coffee

line, you overhear Sally say to George, 1 For details, see Dowell [2011].2 See also Egan [2007].

8

(B) “Joe might be in Boston”.

Suppose also that you saw Joe an hour ago in Berkeley. To

some, it seems fine for you to say, sotto voce, to the

person standing next to you,

(S) “What Sally said is false; I just saw Joe an

hour.”3

Suppose that Joe’s being in Boston is compatible with what

Sally and George together know. How can the contextualist

make sense of the felicity of (S)? The idea here is that,

since you’re not part of the conversation in which (B)

occurs, it’s not plausible for the contextualist to hold

that your information is relevant for determining what Sally

has said (MacFarlane, 146-47, 151).

One issue here is whether (S) is felicitous by being

warranted, as MacFarlane’s argument requires. If (S) sounds

felicitous because it manifests the speaker’s semantic

competence with the relevant expressions, the contextualist 3 Here I somewhat modify MacFarlane’s discussion of the case(146) to reflect that the target of the dispute is the proper semantics and pragmatics of modal expressions, not how to understand apparent mental evaluations of them. For discussion of true eavesdropper cases, see Yalcin (304) and Egan [2007].

9

can explain its felicity as easily as the relativist.4

Another issue is whether the data in these cases is clearly

relativist-friendly. As Yalcin notes, intuitions are split

in such cases5 and this needs explaining (Yalcin, 305). One

possible contextualist-friendly explanation is that

eavesdropping contexts are defective and their defects make

it unclear what the original speaker has said, and so

unclear what our eavesdropper has said. This would explain

the split in intuitions; different assessors repair the

context in different ways, hearing what’s said in different

ways.6

Also related to the Challenge from Disagreement is the

Challenge from Agreement. Consider a case from the Egan and

Weatherson introduction (8-9).7 Suppose that Andy has read

some publicly available material on Jack the Ripper. From

his reading, he doesn’t conclude that Prince Albert Victor 4 For a discussion of why warrant matters in challenges fromeavesdropper and semantic instability cases, see Dowell [2011].5 Here Yalcin cites the results of a study he did with Joshua Knobe, citing their [2010] paper.6 For a detailed development of such a proposal, see Dowell [2011].7 See also Egan [2007].

10

is the Ripper. But he does correctly conclude that this

evidence doesn’t rule him out as a suspect. Later, watching

a program on the Ripper, he hears the announcer say,

(V) “Prince Albert Victor might have been Jack the

Ripper”.

It seems that Andy can felicitously respond,

(T) “That’s true”.

What is the contextually relevant group such that Andy is in

a position to affirm what the announcer said? Even if the

announcer intends to include in the relevant group anyone

watching the program, Andy isn’t in a position to affirm

that Victor’s being the Ripper is compatible with the

information had by that group. For all Andy knows, someone

watching the program has evidence that decisively rules him

out. Of those discussed so far, this challenge appears to

be the strongest for the relativist. A relativist may hold

that asserting (V) is warranted, given the information the

announcer has at his context of assessment, since this is

just the context of utterance. At the same time, Andy’s

agreement with what the announcer has said is warranted,

11

given that it is compatible with the information Andy has at

his context of assessment.

What should a contextualist say about agreement cases?

One issue here is whether it’s clear that Andy’s apparent

agreement is warranted. As we’ve seen, it’s not difficult

for the contextualist to make sense of felicitous, but

unwarranted assertions. Is it so obvious that what Andy has

said sounds fine not only because he competently uses the

expressions he does, but also because what he’s said is

warranted? Another question is whether it’s clear that what

Andy says amounts to a standard case of agreement or instead

is merely agreement-like, some kind of faux agreement. In

the imagined scenario, Andy is responding to the assertion

of someone he is not in conversation with, indeed, someone

who can’t hear him; he’s talking to the television. This

isn’t uncommon, but it would be uncommon for a speaker to

take herself to be doing the same thing talking to her

television that she would be doing if she were talking to

someone who might hear her. To see this, consider two

slightly different scenarios; in the first, a man sits

12

courtside yelling “don’t shoot!” at a teammate about to make

an ill-timed attempt at the basket. In the second, the man

isn’t a teammate of the shooter, but a fan of the latter’s

team, watching on television. In the first case, it’s

plausible that the man’s utterance is a directive, in

Searle’s sense. It’s an attempt to get the hearer to do

something. In the second case, that’s not plausible. So,

what is the speaker doing? Well, he’s doing something that

is fit to serve as a directive, if the shooter could hear

him. Since he can’t, it must be something else, perhaps an

expression of frustration at the player’s poor performance.

What’s Andy doing in the scenario in which he’s talking

to his television? He’s doing something that is clearly fit

to be an expression of agreement with the announcer, were

the announcer in a position to hear him. Is it so clear

that what he is doing amounts to agreeing, given that the

announcer can’t? To my ear, it isn’t. But there is one

more available, contextualist-friendly explanation for those

ears that hear clear agreement: In the scenario, Andy relies

on publicly available information, much as, we might assume,

13

the announcer does. In hearing (T) as a genuine expression

of agreement, mightn’t we be assuming, and assuming Andy is

assuming, that he and the announcer have much the same

information? If so, then the contextualist has no trouble

explaining why we hear what Andy says as expressing

agreement with the very proposition the announcer has

uttered. To rule out this possibility, we’d need to

consider a case in which it’s clear that Andy and the

announcer have quite different bodies of information. I

would be surprised, though, if speakers uniformly heard (T)

in such a case as a clear expression of agreement.

Another challenge to contextualism stems from

metasemantic considerations. It’s apparent from

consideration of the full range of cases in the literature

that, whatever story the contextualist favors about how it

is that modal propositions are determined as a function of

context of use, it won’t be much like any of the

straightforward stories that can be told about paradigmatic

indexicals, such as “I” or “now”. Egan and Weatherson

suggest that this means that the metasemantic story will

14

need to be “hideously complex” (9). Thinking about

paradigmatic indexicals, one might think that the

metasemantic story for context-sensitive expressions are

never “hideously complex”. If so, that would cast doubt on

the plausibility of any contextualist about of epistemic

modals. (Call this the Challenge from Metasemantic Complexity.)

However, as Michael Glanzberg [2007] notes,8 whatever

the proper story is for how demonstratives get their

referents determined as a function of context, it’s going to

be pretty complex. So, there are clearly context-sensitive

terms that require complex metasemantic stories. Indeed,

one might treat the case of demonstratives as a source of

inspiration for the development of a proper metasemantic

story for a contextualist account of modals.9 There’s a

related objection one might press here instead, though. It

might seem that, absent such a story for our modal

expressions, any contextualist account of epistemic modals

is hopelessly ad hoc.10 However, that objection is a 8 Egan and Weatherson note his noting (9).9 I pursue this strategy in Dowell [2011].10 See Egan, Hawthorne, and Weatherson [2005] for development of an objection of this kind.

15

double-edged sword. Consideration of the full range of

cases in the literature also shows that the relativist will

require a complex story about how it is that bodies of

information are made relevant for the determination of

truth-values at contexts of assessment.11

Egan and Weatherson suggest a second metasemantic

challenge, the Challenge from “Semantic Change in Attitude Ascriptions”

(9-11). It begins with an observation about some clearly

context-sensitive expressions, such as “we”. It seems to be

part of the semantics of “we” that the speaker must be

included in the group denoted. Similarly, in many cases,

the speaker seems to be in the group whose information must

be (by the contextualist’s lights) content-determining at a

context in which an epistemic modal is used. So, they

suggest, the contextualist must hold that “by analogy, it is

part of the meaning of ‘might’ that the speaker is always

11 I press this reply more fully in Dowell [2011]. See thatpaper and also von Fintel and Gillies [2008] for cases that show that a relativist must be flexible about whose information is relevant for determining truth at a context of assessment. Finally, Dowell [2011] also develops a non-ad hoc, contextualist-friendly metasemantic account of the needed kind.

16

part of the [group relevant at a context of use]”. If true,

we should then expect that the speaker is always included in

the relevant group. The trouble for that view, they note,

is that there are other cases that require the speaker’s

exclusion, e.g. some cases of attitude attribution. So,

the idea goes, contextualism creates an expectation defeated

by the data. This, they conclude “look(s) like a good

enough argument to motivate alternatives”.

Given their acceptance of Glanzberg’s observation,

however, this argument is a bit surprising. If we model the

metasemantic story for modals on the story for

demonstratives, rather than a context-sensitive term like

“we”, we won’t expect them to have simple constraints on the

range of values they can take at a context. That the

speaker must sometimes be excluded to understand certain

cases can then be taken to be some reason to think epistemic

modals don’t function like “we”. But there’s an independent

reason to think they don’t. Epistemic modals aren’t special

kinds of expression, on the canonical contextualist account.

They’re semantically neutral expressions that take on an

17

epistemic flavor as a function of context. True, some

expressions, like “might”, seem to require an epistemic

flavor. But others, such as “ought” and “must”, have both

deontic and epistemic flavors. Some deontic uses of “ought”

and “must”, what I elsewhere call “objective” uses,12 are

clearly not relative to anyone’s information; they’re

relative to the facts. If the contextualist were required

to hold that being relative to a body of information that

includes the speaker’s was part of the meaning of “ought”

and “must”, we’d have a pretty quick demonstration that

contextualism is false. But the contextualist needn’t say

that and, for these reasons, shouldn’t say that.

What the contextualist does need, though, is an

explanation for why the speaker is included in some cases

and excluded in others. Elsewhere I argue that what the

clear cases requiring speaker inclusion share is figuring in

rationalizing explanations of a speaker’s action. In cases

in which an epistemic modal is being used to explain

another’s action, the speaker may be clearly excluded. It’s

12 See, for example, my [forthcoming].

18

easy to see how such a proposal will at least track the

needed distinction between unembedded uses and those

involving third-personal attitude attributions. (For a

detailed explanation for why action explanations in

particular should generate the observed pattern, see Dowell

[2011].)

Yalcin, in his paper here and elsewhere,13 poses another

important challenge to contextualism, the Challenge from

Epistemic Contradictions (Yalcin, 300-02, echoed by Yablo, 273).

Sentences of the form “ and ~might ” “sound awful”, he

suggests. While initially it might seem that the oddity of

those could be given a Moorean, pragmatic explanation, along

the lines one could give for “, but I don’t know it”, that

explanation is defeated by embedding each under “suppose”:

“Suppose , but I don’t know it” sounds fine (as a Moorean

explanation would predict), but, “suppose and ~might ”

doesn’t. The problem, as Yalcin sees it, is that it’s not

clear how any descriptivist account of epistemic modals talk

could make sense of the oddity of such suppositions, since

13Yalcin (2007).

19

descriptivists hold that unembedded, declarative uses of

epistemic modals represent ways things could be (298). If

they represent ways things could be, then “ and ~might ”

should represent a way things could be. But then it should

be possible to suppose that things are as “ and ~might ”

represents them as being. But it isn’t. Since

contextualism is a form of descriptivism, this presents a

problem for contextualism (301).

Is it really so hard to find such suppositions

intelligible, though? Consider this case. Imagine a

father, after hearing the morning’s weather report, asks his

young son to carry his raincoat to school with him. “But

it’s not raining!” his son protests. “No, it’s not”, his

father concedes, “but it might. And whenever it might rain,

you should carry your raincoat.” Imagine that his son

continues to protest.

(W) “But what if it doesn’t rain! Then I’ll have

carried my coat for nothing!”

It is perfectly good, fatherly advice to reply,

20

(R) “Well, suppose it doesn’t rain, but it might. In

that case, it’s still a good idea to carry your

raincoat.”

It’s not hard to multiply cases of advice and instruction of

this kind. If that’s right, then “contradictions” doesn’t

seem an apt label for such constructions. And, more

importantly, the descriptivist seems well-poised to explain

why such uses sound fine.14

Swanson, Yablo, and Yalcin each offer additional

challenges to contextualism, as well as thoughtful

suggestions for what a rival proposal that meets them might

look like. Space prevents me from considering their rich

discussions, but they are all excellent, deserving of a

careful read. In the space I have remaining, I’ll turn to

very quick discussions of the positive, semantic proposals

of Jonathan Schaffer and Kent Bach, which are interesting to

consider together, and then to a brief discussion of the

papers addressing the volume’s first question.

14 Thanks to Herman Cappelen for first suggesting an exampleof this kind.

21

In his contribution, Schaffer focuses not on addressing

the many challenges to contextualism, but to identifying

linguistic phenomena that contextualism seems better poised

to explain than relativism. These phenomena suggest that at

least “might” and “must” used epistemically contain open

arguments in the semantics that get filled at a context by a

body of evidence (or bound) (201-09). These phenomena

suggest that such evidence figures in what’s said, as on the

contextualist’s view, as opposed to part of what makes

what’s said true, as on the relativist’s.

Bach’s radical invariantism is the view that “bare

epistemic modal sentences are semantically incomplete” (20).

This, he suggests, contrasts with both contextualism and

relativism. Unlike radical invariantism, each of the latter

“commit the Proposition Fallacy: they assume that if a

sentence…can be used to convey a proposition, the sentence

itself must express one” (29). Set aside the issue of

whether this assumption is fallacious. It’s clear that it’s

one the relativist accepts, since the relativist is a

semantic invariantist. But what about the contextualist?

22

Schaffer is a contextualist. As we’ve seen, he suggests

that bare epistemic modal sentences contain open argument

places that must be filled by context or bound with a

quantifier. So, on his view, there is no proposition

semantics assigns to, e.g., “there might be licorice in the

cupboard” (179). This raises a question about what exactly

the contrast is between radical invariantism and certain

forms of contextualism about bare epistemic modals.

Finally, I turn to an all too brief discussion of the

papers on the nature of epistemic possibility. Both

Jackson’s and Chalmers’ papers are concerned in part in how

a notion of epistemic possibility might help illuminate the

phenomena of a posteriori necessities. One question each

paper addresses is: How might we understand the notion of

epistemic possibility such that it is able to serve this

purpose? For Jackson, the phenomena of sentences that

express propositions that are both metaphysically necessary

and knowable only a posteriori serve to highlight a

difficulty for possible worlds semantics. Given that the

propositions such sentences express are necessary, how are

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we to understand the representational content they may

communicate? On one proposal, one Jackson rejects, there

are two distinct spaces of possibilities, the metaphysical

and the conceptual ones. The space of conceptual

possibilities is broader than the space of metaphysical

ones; there are metaphysically impossible, conceptual

possibilities. On the resulting view, we might represent

the information communicated by the acceptance of a sentence

like “water is H2O” by the ruling out of metaphysically

impossible, conceptual possibilities in which water fails to

be H2O. This proposal is a rival to his own favored two-

dimensionalist view, on which there aren’t two spaces of

possibilities, but rather one space, which may be carved in

two different ways. The burden of Jackson’s compelling

argument is to show two ways in which allowing for

conceptually possible metaphysical impossibilities seems to

lead to incoherence.

David Chalmers is more hopeful that a genuinely

conceptual or epistemic notion of possibility may be

developed that is independent of our metaphysical notion and

24

that serves the purposes we want such a notion to serve.

But he also thinks a purely metaphysical strategy shows

promise. In his paper, he develops one of each, noting some

possible drawbacks for the metaphysical strategy, while

holding out greater hope for the epistemic one. Here I’ll

explain and then raise one question about the metaphysical

strategy.

Any definition of epistemic space, he argues, must obey

certain principles. Among those is Plentitude. Where s is

any possible assertive sentence token, Plentitude is the

thesis that

For all sentences s, s is epistemically possible iff there exists a scenario w such that w verifies s.

To each scenario, there corresponds exactly one canonical

description, d, of that scenario (64), where canonical

descriptions are given in an entirely neutral (i.e. non-Twin

Earthable) vocabulary, together with centering information

(69-71). A scenario, w, verifies s, when d epistemically

necessitates s (70). Epistemic necessitation, in turn, is a

matter of a priori entailment (67), where the notion of the

25

a priori is unconstrained by any actual cognitive limitation

(66).

How does this framework help illuminate the puzzling

phenomena of a posteriori metaphysical necessities?

Chalmers suggests we accept a notion of “deep epistemic

possibility” on which anything that isn’t ruled out a priori

is deeply epistemically possible (63). So, to illuminate

the phenomena of a posteriori necessities, this framework

will need to make room for the deep epistemic possibility of

the falsity of metaphysical necessities. Here’s how he

suggests it does so:

When n is a standard a posteriori necessity [such as that water is H2O], it is plausible that while all worlds satisfy n [i.e. n comes out true at all worlds w considered as standard worlds of evaluation], some centered world [i.e. scenario] verifies ~n…In these cases, we have a centered world verifying the relevant deep epistemic possibilities, as Plenitude requires (71).

However, it’s not entirely clear, from the description

of the framework given, how this could be so. Remember that

verification by a scenario w involves the ability of an

ideal reasoner to a priori deduce ~n, from w’s canonical

26

description d. Let “n” be “water is H2O” and ~n be “water

isn’t H2O”. Remember that d is in entirely neutral

vocabulary (of some idealized language), plus centering.

The puzzle is: How could any reasoner, no matter how ideal,

a priori deduce the truth of any sentence containing a

natural kind term from the truth of any sentence d? Since

the vocabulary of any d is entirely non-Twin earthable, it

doesn’t contain sufficient information to determine the

truth-value of any sentence containing a natural kind term.

Let me put this another way. Notice first that

scenarios are more coarse-grained than worlds (as Chalmers

notes in connection with a different possible objection to

his framework (73)). To see this, let da be the canonical

description of the scenario that corresponds to the actual

world plus some stipulated centering C and dt be the

canonincal description of the Twin world plus C. If

canonical descriptions can only be given in a neutral

vocabulary, da=dt. Given that, canonical descriptions can’t

be informationally rich enough to settle whether water is or

27

isn’t H2O. Indeed, it’s hard to see how there could be a

fact of the matter.

There may well be a similar puzzle for Chalmers’

epistemic construction of epistemic space. I leave that for

the reader to determine.

References

Dowell, J.L. Forthcoming. “Contextualist Solutions to ThreePuzzles about Practical Conditionals.” In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, volume 7, ed. R. Shafer-Landau.

Dowell, J.L. 2011. “A Flexible, Contextualist Account of Epistemic Modals.” Philosopher’s Imprint 11 (14): 1-25.

Egan, Andy. 2007. “Epistemic Modals, Relativism, and Assertion.” PhilosophicalStudies 133: 1–22.

Egan, Andy, John Hawthorne, and Brian Weatherson. 2005. “Epistemic Modals in Context.” In Contextualism in Philosophy, ed. G. Preyer and G. Peter, 131–69. New York: Oxford University Press.

von Fintel, Kai and Anthony S. Gillies. 2008. “CIA leaks.” Philosophical Review 117: 77–98.

Glanzberg, Michael. 2007. “Context, Content, and Relativism.”Philosophical Studies 136:1-29.

Knobe, Joshua and Seth Yalcin. 2010. “Fat Tony Might Be Dead.” Unpublished, http://yalcin.cc/resources/yalcin.2010.knobe.fat-tony-might-

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be-dead.pdf.

Yalcin, Seth. 2007. “Epistemic Modals.” Mind 116 (464): 983-1026.

J.L. DowellUniversity of Nebraska-Lincoln

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