Weak and Strong Necessity Modals Or : On linguistic means of expressing a “ primitive concept ought ” *

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Silk, Alex Plunkett, D. Eliot, George
Copyright Year	2017
Abstract	This paper develops an account of the meaning of ‘ought’, and the distinction between weak necessity modals (‘ought’, ‘should’) and strong necessity modals (‘must’, ‘have to’). I argue that there is nothing specially “strong” about strong necessity modals per se: uses of ‘Must φ’ can be given their familiar semantics/pragmatics, predicating the (deontic/epistemic/etc.) necessity of the prejacent φ of the actual world (evaluation world). The apparent “weakness” of weak necessity modals derives from their bracketing whether the necessity of the prejacent is verified in the actual world. ‘Ought φ’ can be accepted without accepting that the relevant considerations (norms, expectations, etc.) that actually apply, given the facts, verify the necessity of φ. I call the basic general account a modal-past approach to the weak/strong necessity modal distinction (for reasons that become evident). Several ways of implementing the approach in the formal semantics/pragmatics are critically examined. The proposed account systematizes a wide range of linguistic phenomena: it generalizes across flavors of modality; it elucidates a special role that weak necessity modals play in discourse and planning; it captures contrasting logical, expressive, and illocutionary properties of weak and strong necessity modals; and it sheds light on how a notion of ‘ought’ is often expressed in other languages. These phenomena have resisted systematic explanation. Examining the weak/strong necessity modal distinction sheds light on interesting general issues concerning context-sensitivity, mood, grammaticalization, attitude expression, and performativity. In closing I briefly suggest how clarifying distinctions among necessity modals may improve theorizing on broader philosophical issues. *Thanks to Matthew Chrisman, Brendan Dill, Jan Dowell, Irene Heim, Ezra Keshet, Dan Lassiter, Paul Portner, Bernhard Salow, Robert Shanklin, Bob Stalnaker, Eric Swanson, and audiences at SALT 22, MIT, Northwestern, and USC. Preliminary versions of this paper, first posted 2011, were published in Semantics and Linguistic Theory 22 (2012): 43–64, and Silk 2013d: ch. 2. Portions of §7 are drawn also from Silk 2015b. †Mary Garth, in Middlemarch, Bk. 2, Ch. 14. Shamelessly modified from the original.
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Alternate Webpage(s)	http://www-personal.umich.edu/~asilk/Alex_Silk/home_files/silk%20ought%20must.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article