Online Papers - Brian Weatherson

Epistemic Modals in Context 270
prove a universal 7 – but the case does seem to provide good prima facie vidence for
DeRose’s constraint.
One implication of DeRose’s theory is that (1) is false, at least when Professor
Granger says it. For when Professor Granger reports that Myles says “She might be
in Prague,” she is reporting a claim he makes about his epistemic community – that
her being in Prague is compatible with the things that they know. But when she says
(in the second clause) that this means he is saying that she might be in Prague, she
speaks falsely. For in her mouth the phrase “that I might be in Prague” denotes the
proposition that it’s compatible with the knowledge of an epistemic community that
includes Professor Granger (as the speaker) that Professor Granger is in Prague. And
that is not a proposition that Myles assented to. So DeRose’s theory implies that the
very intuitive (1) is false when uttered by Granger.
(1) When he says, “She might be in Prague” Myles says that I might be in Prague.
It is worth emphasizing how counterintuitive this consequence of speaker-inclusion
is. If the speaker-inclusion constraint holds universally then in general speech involving
epistemic modals cannot be reported disquotationally. But notice how natural it
is, when telling the story of Jack and Jill, to describe the situation (as we ourselves
did in an earlier draft of this paper) as being one where “Whenever Jack eats pepperoni
pizza, he forgets that he has ten fingers, and thinks he might only have eight.”
Indeed, it is an important generalization about how we use language that speakers
usually do not hesitate to disquote in reporting speeches using epistemic modals. So
much so that exceptions to this general principle are striking – as when the tenses of
the original speech and the report do not match up, and the tense difference matters
to the plausibility of the attribution.
One might try to explain away the data just presented by maintaining a laxity for
‘says that’ reports. A chemist might say ‘The bottle is empty’ meaning it is empty
of air, while milkman might utter the same sentence, meaning in my context that
it is empty of milk. Nevertheless, the milkman might be slightly ambivalent about
denying:
When the chemist says ‘The bottle is empty’, she says that the bottle is
empty.
And this is no doubt because the overt ‘says that’ construction frequently deploys
adjectives and verbs in a rather quotational way. After all, the chemist could get away
with the following speech in ordinary discourse: “I know the milkman said that the
bottle is empty. But he didn’t mean what I meant when I said that the bottle is empty.
When he said that the bottle was empty he meant that it was empty of milk.” 8 Thus
the conventions of philosophers for using ‘say that’ involve regimenting ordinary use
analysis cannot do the work of the relevant side constraint.
7 And see the case of Tom and Sally in the maze below for some countervailing evidence.
8 Notice that this use prohibits the inference from: The speaker said that the bottle was empty, to, The
speaker expressed the proposition/said something that meant that the bottle was empty.