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Chapter 5 begins to develop an improved contextualist account of normative language by applying the Discourse Contextualist framework to deontic modals. Though epistemic modals and deontic modals share many of the distinctive features that make them apt for a Discourse Contextualist treatment, they also differ in important respects. Discourse Contextualism illuminates crucial roles for normative language in discourse and deliberation. A Discourse Contextualist semantics and pragmatics provides a perspicuous framework for further theorizing about the nature of normativity and the distinctive practical character of normative language and judgment, as investigated in debates over realism, relativism, and noncognitivism in ethics/metaethics. The chapter concludes by briefly examining a second dimension of context-sensitivity with deontic modals: their information-sensitivity.

This chapter develops an account of the meaning and use of various types of legal claims, and uses this account to inform debates about the nature and normativity of law. The account draws on a general framework for implementing a contextualist theory, called Discourse Contextualism (Silk 2015a, 2016, 2017). The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the apparent normativity of claims of law from a particular contextualist interpretation of a standard semantics for modals, along with general principles of interpretation and conversation. Though the semantics is descriptivist, it avoids Dworkin’s influential criticism of so-called “semantic theories of law,” and elucidates the nature of “theoretical disagreements” about the criteria of legal validity. The account sheds light on the social, interpersonal function of normative uses of language in legal discourse. It also gives precise expression to Hart’s and Raz’s intuitive distinctions among types of legal claims (internal/external, committed/detached). The proposed semantics and pragmatics of legal claims provides a fruitful framework for further theorizing about the nature and metaphysics of law, the relation between law and morality, and the apparent practical character of legal language and judgment. Discourse Contextualism provides a solid linguistic basis for a broader account of legal discourse and practice.

This chapter discusses three puzzles about practical conditionals and inferences and shows how the flexible, contextualist semantic framework for “ought”. The chapter develops elsewhere resolves all three puzzles more satisfactorily than any of its three most prominent rivals, the relativist account of Niko Kolodny and John MacFarlane (2010), the wide-scoping account of John Broome (2004), and the “trying on” account of James Dreier (2009). The chapter first introduces the puzzle cases and six desiderata for their solutions, and then shows how only flexible contextualism about “ought” is able to resolve each while satisfying all six desiderata.

This chapter investigates how inquiry into normative language can improve substantive normative theorizing. First, it examines two dimensions along which normative language differs: “strength” and “subjectivity.” Next, it shows how greater sensitivity to these features of the meaning and use of normative language can illuminate debates about three issues in ethics: the coherence of moral dilemmas, the possibility of supererogatory acts, and the connection between making a normative judgment and being motivated to act accordingly. The chapter concludes with several brief reflections on the theoretical utility of the distinction—at least so-called—between “normative” and “non-normative” language and judgment. Clarifying the language we use in normative conversation and theorizing can help us diagnose problems with bad arguments and formulate better motivated questions. This can lead to clearer answers and bring into relief new theoretical possibilities and avenues to explore.

This chapter begins the discussion of graded modality with a review of two influential previous accounts. Lewis’ qualitative theory of comparative goodness begins with an ordinal scale – like those discussed in chapter 2, but composed of propositions rather than individuals. Measurement-theoretic considerations reveal that Lewis’ semantics is inadequate on several fronts, including the interpretation of quantitative comparisons (much better than) and a problematic ‘maximax’ feature that Lewis himself identifies. Kratzer’s proposal – a modification of Lewis’ which extends the account to non-gradable modals and graded epistemics – is presented, along with a compositional implementation using tools developed in ch.2. This theory shares the problems of Lewis’ theory, and adds additional problems due to unified treatment of epistemic and deontic modals. While this unification is methodologically attractive, it is also empirically problematic because epistemic and deontic comparatives generate radically different validities in cases involving disjunction and subset reasoning.

This chapter extends the free-absolutive (or argument-sharing) analysis of ‘raising’ to what are claimed to be ‘control’ structures of various kinds, including causatives, tough-movement structures (e.g., in The lock was easy to pick), passives, and modals (deontic may etc., which, when epistemic, also show ‘raising’). The discussion of syntactic, morphological, and lexical causatives involves a comparison of English, French, and Turkish. ‘Control’ involves the association of a free absolutive with other relations rather than, as in ‘raising’, its having an independent role. ‘Controllers’of different types are recognized: ‘agentive’, ‘experiencer’, and locative (in tough-movement structures), so that a free absolutive is associated with a source and so on. Various restrictions associated with the ‘controllers’ that contract these different semantic relations are also explored.

The chapter proposes an account of epistemic indefinites cross-linguistically, focusing on the case of German irgendein and Italian un qualche. Four main functions for EIs are identified initially: specific unknown (SU); epistemic unknown (epiU); negative polarity (NPI); and the deontic free choice (deoFC). It is subsequently observed that while irgendein qualifies for all functions, un qualche qualifies only for the first two. The second part of the chapter proposes an account of these data in the framework of a Dynamic Semantics with Conceptual Covers. Our point of departure is the assumption that epistemic indefinites are existentials with two additional characteristics: (i) they induce an obligatory domain shift and (ii) they are felicitous only if such a shift is for a reason.

David Lewis in ‘A Problem About Permission’ asks about the effect on context of permitting the previously forbidden. The set of permissible worlds expands, but how? One can ask in a similar vein about the effects of calling a circumstance possible which had previously been ruled out. This chapter proposes a unified rule. Permission to take the day off adds in world W if the reasons W was initially ruled out all imply taking the day off. W remains impermissible if the reasons it was initially ruled out include some that could still have obtained even if one had remained at work. Similarly, ‘It might rain’ adds a world to the context set if and only if was ruled out for rain-implying reasons. These rules turn out to have non-trivial effects even if the new possibility was not previously ruled out. This runs counter to Lewis, but is arguably the right result.

This chapter turns to the semantics of our ordinary talk about structural rationality. Such talk is typically conditional in form, and there is a challenge about whether it squares with the account of the fundamental form of the requirements of structural rationality defended in the previous chapter. Some have tried to meet this challenge by saying that ordinary conditional normative utterances express wide-scope claims, but this chapter argues that this theory is not semantically plausible. Instead, it shows how a standard contextualist semantics for modals and conditionals can vindicate the truth of ordinary conditional utterances about rationality and, indeed, how it can say that these utterances come out true in virtue of requirements of structural rationality of the kind defended in the previous chapter.

This chapter offers an account of the truth conditions of sentences involving terms like ‘ought’. These truth conditions involve a function from worlds of evaluation to domains of worlds, and an ordering of the worlds in such domains. Every such ordering arises from a probability function and a value function—since it ranks worlds according to the expected value of certain propositions that are true at those worlds. With the objective ‘ought’, the probability function is the omniscient function, which assigns 1 to all truths and 0 to all falsehoods; with the subjective ‘ought’, the probability function captures the uncertainty of the relevant agent. The relevance of this account for understanding conditionals is explored, and this account is defended against objections. For present purposes, the crucial point is that any normative use of ‘ought’ is normative because of the value that is semantically involved. The fundamental normative concepts are evaluative.

This chapter introduces and motivates parentheticalism about sentences of the form “S wants to ϕ‎.” It is argued that they manifest similar forms of transparency in first-person uses as in the case of “believe,” and that here, too, they are best explained in terms of parentheticalism. Again, formal implementations of the view are suggested. Special attention is paid to the semantics of the complements of “want,” which are argued to be similar to imperative contents. Parentheticalism about “want” is shown to provide an attractive account of certain indicative conditionals (hypothetical imperatives or so-called “anankastic” conditionals) and of certain instances of practical reasoning.

The chapter suggests a new role for authority and interest in the theory of right: Rights can be explicated as sets of prohibitions, permissions and commands, and they must be justified by interests. The chapter argues as follows: (1) The two dominant theories of right—“Will Theory” and “Interest Theory”—have certain standard problems. (2) These problems are systematic: Will Theory’s criterion of the ability to enforce a duty is either false or empty outside of its original legal context, whereas Interest Theory includes in the definition of a right what actually belongs to the justification of the practice within which that right is assigned. (3) The chapter recasts the connection between authority, interests, and rights in a way that avoids each theory’s standard problem. (4) The resulting theory also has three further advantages: It analyzes rights in terms of very basic and familiar concepts, it mirrors the understanding of rights in actual public discourse, and it is compatible with a wide selection of moral theories. Since its core is about a specific use of modal auxiliary verbs, this new theory is called the “Modal Theory of Right.”

The semantics of good places strong constraints on the better-studied and near-synonymous items ought and should. I argue that comparative goodness fact constrain – but do not determine – the interpretation of ought, and propose “Sloman’s Principle”: ought p implies that p is better than all of its alternatives. This is not yet a semantics for ought, but it takes us surprisingly far, as I show by analysing a number of puzzles involving ought and probabilistic information. It is also incompatible with the classically valid inference patterns “agglomeration” and “deontic detachment”. Several examples and an experiment show that this consequence is correct. The account can be strengthened to enforce validities such as the “Smith argument” (Horty 2003) and Weakening (Cariani 2015). Finally, I provide data showing that ought and should are actually the positive forms of gradable verbs, and discuss prospects for deriving their behaviour from the structure of their scales.

This chapter turns to deontic concepts. I argue that goodness is an interval scale, and consider two interactions with disjunction that would enforce the validity of the Disjunctive Inference: maximality (à la Lewis and Kratzer) and intermediacy. I identify a number of empirically problematic consequences of maximality, concluding that goodness is intermediate: a disjunction can be strictly worse than one of the disjuncts. I propose, as one way to flesh out the scale further, that goodness has the formal structure of expected value, and show that this proposal makes intuitively reasonable predictions about the puzzle cases for maximality as well as a wide variety of instances in which probabilistic information influences the relative goodness of outcomes. Finally, I discuss several possible schemata for the interpretation of the positive form good in light of the sensitivity of this item to prosodic focus and the non-synonymy of its positive and superlative forms.