{"title":"Strengthened, and weakened, by belief.","authors":"Tue Trinh","doi":"10.1007/s10988-023-09391-4","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper discusses a set of observations, many of which are novel, concerning differences between the adjectival modals <i>certain</i> and <i>possible</i> and their adverbial counterparts <i>certainly</i> and <i>possibly</i>. It argues that the observations can be derived from a standard interpretation of <i>certain</i>/<i>certainly</i> as universal and <i>possible</i>/<i>possibly</i> as existential quantifiers over possible worlds, in conjunction with the hypothesis that the adjectives quantify over knowledge and the adverbs quantify over belief. The claims on which the argument relies include the following: (i) knowledge implies belief, (ii) agents have epistemic access to their belief, (iii) relevance is closed under speakers' belief, and (iv) commitment is pragmatically inconsistent with explicit denial of belief.</p>","PeriodicalId":47748,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics and Philosophy","volume":"1 1","pages":"37-76"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10853343/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Linguistics and Philosophy","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-023-09391-4","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2023/8/31 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
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Abstract
This paper discusses a set of observations, many of which are novel, concerning differences between the adjectival modals certain and possible and their adverbial counterparts certainly and possibly. It argues that the observations can be derived from a standard interpretation of certain/certainly as universal and possible/possibly as existential quantifiers over possible worlds, in conjunction with the hypothesis that the adjectives quantify over knowledge and the adverbs quantify over belief. The claims on which the argument relies include the following: (i) knowledge implies belief, (ii) agents have epistemic access to their belief, (iii) relevance is closed under speakers' belief, and (iv) commitment is pragmatically inconsistent with explicit denial of belief.
期刊介绍：
Linguistics and Philosophy focuses on issues related to structure and meaning in natural language, as addressed in the semantics, philosophy of language, pragmatics and related disciplines, in particular the following areas: philosophical theories of meaning and truth, reference, description, entailment, presupposition, implicatures, context-dependence, and speech actslinguistic theories of semantic interpretation in relation to syntactic structure and prosody, of discourse structure, lexcial semantics and semantic changepsycholinguistic theories of semantic interpretation and issues of the processing and acquisition of natural language, and the relation of semantic interpretation to other cognitive facultiesmathematical and logical properties of natural language and general aspects of computational linguisticsphilosophical questions raised by linguistics as a science: linguistics methodology, properties of linguistic theories and frameworks, and the relation of linguistics to other fields of inquiryContributions may be in the form of articles, replies, or review articles. Linguistics and Philosophy is indexed in the ISI/Social Science Citation Index.
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