Epistemic Oughts in Stit Semantics
John F. Horty · Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy · 2019
This paper explores ways in which agentive, deontic, and epistemic concepts combine to yield ought statements, or "oughts," of different characters.I am especially interested in agentive ought statements whose violation invites criticism of the agent.I refer to these statements as "epistemic oughts," since an appeal to knowledge seems to play such an important role in their description.The investigation takes place in the setting of stit semantics, a modal framework for the analysis of agentive statements.I begin by supplementing stit semantics with an epistemic operator, and then exploring an initial account of epistemic oughts that results from combining this operator with agentive and deontic concepts in a straightforward way.After showing that this initial proposal is flawed, I then offer an account of epistemic oughts in which the role of knowledge is more complex, but which escapes the flaws of the initial proposal.Finally, I mention two directions for generalization: to relativistic oughts, and to conditional oughts. 72• John Horty done otherwise.All that differs between the two scenarios is your knowledgewhether or not you know that the coin is heads up.Yet this difference is enough to influence the character of the resulting oughts, inviting criticism in one case but not the other.The primary goal of the paper is to investigate agentive ought statements of the sort found in the second of these scenarios, where violation of the ought seems to invite criticism of the agent.Since an appeal to knowledge seems to play such an important role in the characterization of these statements, I refer to them as epistemic oughts. 1 This investigation is not carried out in general, but in the particular setting of stit semantics, a framework for the analysis of agentive statements originating with a series of papers by Nuel Belnap, Michael Perloff, and Ming Xu, culminating in their Belnap, Perloff, and Xu (2001).Stit semantics grows out of a modal tradition in the logic of action, going back to St. Anselm, but with more recent contributions by, among others,