Disagreement and Epistemic Modality

Elke Brendel (Bonn) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (17 June, 2015) titled "Disagreement and Epistemic Modality". Abstract: Intuitively, the truth conditions of sentences with epistemic modals, such as “It might be that p”, depend on what is epistemically known by a speaker or some contextually relevant group. That is why a contextualist account of epistemic modals seems to provide an adequate semantics for epistemic modal claims. However, contextualism has difficulties to account for the intuition of disagreement about epistemic modal claims: If A claims (according to his knowledge): “It might be that p” and B claims (according to her knowledge) “It cannot be that p”, A and B seem to disagree. They are not merely talking past each other. In my talk, I will first explore the notion of disagreement and present some necessary conditions for two parties disagreeing with each other. Second, I will critically examine the prospects of contextualist semantics as well as truth-relativist accounts in dealing with disagreement about epistemic modal claims. I will finally analyze arguments in favor of an invariantist theory of epistemic modality.

You can listen to Disagreement and Epistemic Modality online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Disagreement and Epistemic Modality is an episode from MCMP – Epistemology by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

This episode is 01:02:14 long.

This episode was published on Jul 8, 2015.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from MCMP – Epistemology when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.