ABSTRACT
Suppose I tell you, “Sobel must be in his office.” 1 There are (at least) two distinct propositions I could be aiming to communicate. First, I could be remarking on his commitments, communicating, roughly, that every action open to him compatible with meeting those commitments locates him in his office. But, second, I could be remarking on what follows from the information available to me, roughly, that my information entails that he’s in his office. A contextualist about modals holds that which proposition is expressed by a sentence containing a modal expression like “must” is a function of the context of utterance. A contextualist about modals in their epistemic use – illustrated by the second reading of my utterance – holds that the proposition expressed by such a use is likewise a function of the context of utterance. The canonical view of modal expressions in English, due primarily to Angelika Kratzer, is contextualist in this sense (Kratzer 1977, 1981, 1991a, 1991b, 2012; Lewis 1975). The core idea is that necessity modals function like universal quantifiers over possibilities, possibility modals like existential ones. In the case of epistemic modals, quantificational domains are restricted to worlds compatible with some body of information. Which body that is is determined by context.
