Eastern APA Symposium

There will be a (refereed) Symposium on my paper "New Dynamics for Epistemic Modality" at this year's Eastern APA meeting. Lisa Warenski will chair the session and Giacomo Sillari will deliver the comments. Giacomo has done some great research on issues that are immediately relevant for my work on epistemic modals, so I am sure I will learn a lot from his comments. Kickoff for the two-hour event is 11:15 on Wednesday December 30th. Here is the abstract of the talk:

A dynamic semantics for epistemically modalised sentences is an attractive alternative to the orthodox view that our best theory of meaning ascribes to such sentences truth-conditions relative to what is known. I will demonstrate that a dynamic story about might and must offers elegant explanations of a range of puzzling observations about epistemic modals. It provides a unifying treatment of disputes about epistemic modality and disputes about matters of fact while at the same time avoiding relativism or an overly weak pragmatics. It also explains why agents are sometimes agnostic about certain epistemic possibilities and why they sometimes accept must-statements even though they do not know the prejacent.

The material presented is taken from my paper "Dynamics of Epistemic Modality", which gives you the full version of my story about epistemic modals. A draft of the full story is available in the Research section.