Online Papers - Brian Weatherson

Epistemic Modals in Context 287
Emily’s statement is determinately true, from Thursday’s it is not. Hence the truth
of statements is relative to a context of evaluation.
There is a natural extension of this theory to the cases described above. Moriarty’s
statement is true relative to a context C iff it is compatible with what the
people in C know that Holmes is in Paris. So in the context he uttered it, the statement
is true, because it is consistent with what everyone in his context knows that
Holmes is in Paris. But in the context of Watson’s report, it is false, because Watson
and Holmes know that Holmes is not in Paris.
We will call any such theory of epistemic modals a relativist theory, because it says
that the truth of an utterance containing an epistemic modal is relative to a context of
evaluation. As we will see, relativist theories do a much better job than contextualist
theories of handling the data that troubled contextualist theories. Relativist theories
are also plausible for the predicates we discussed at the end of the last section: ‘huge’,
‘color’ and ‘tastes’. On such a theory, any utterance that x tastes F is true iff x tastes
F to us. Similarly, an utterance x is huge that doesn’t have a comparison class, as in
(41) or (44), is true iff x is huge relative to us. And Those swatches are the same color is
true iff they look the same colour to us. The reference to us in the truth conditions
of these sentences isn’t because there’s a special reference to us in the lexical entry
for any of these worlds. Rather, the truth of any utterance involving these terms is
relative to a context of evaluation, and when that is our context of evaluation, we get
to determine what is true and what is false. If the sentences were being evaluated in
a different context, it would be the standards of that context that mattered to their
truth.
So far we have not talked about the pragmatics of epistemic modals, assuming that
their assertability conditions are given by their truth conditions plus some familiar
Gricean norms. But it is not obvious how to apply some of those norms if utterance
truth is contextually relative, because one of the norms is that one should say only
what is true.
One option is to say that utterance appropriateness is, like utterance truth, relative
to a context of evaluation. This is consistent, but it does not seem to respect
the data. Watson might think that Moriarty’s utterance is false, at least relative to
his context of evaluation 33 , but if he is aware of Moriarty’s epistemic state he should
think it is appropriate. So if something like truth is a norm of assertion, it must be
truth relative to one or other context. But which one?
We could say that one should only say things that are true relative to all contexts.
But that would mean John’s statement about the two swatches being the same colour
would be inappropriate, and that seems wrong.
We could say that one should only say things that are true relative to some contexts.
But then Brian could have said, “Rotting carcases taste great” and he would
have said something appropriate, because that’s true when evaluated by vultures.
33 We do not assume here that ordinary speakers, like Watson, explicitly make judgments about the
truth of utterances relative to a context of evaluation, as such. They do make judgments about the truth of
utterances, and those judgments are made in contexts, but they don’t explicitly makes judgments of truth
relative to context of evaluation. One of the nice features, however, of the relativist account is that it is
possible to do an attractive rational reconstruction of most of their views in terms of contexts.