Deontic Modal Expressions
J. L. Dowell · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025
Abstract Over the past fifteen years, linguists and philosophers of language have re-examined the canonical, Kratzerian semantics for modal expressions, with special attention paid to their epistemic and deontic uses. This chapter is an overview of the literature on deontic modal expressions. Section 1 provides an overview of the canonical semantics, noting some of its main advantages. Section 2 introduces a set of desiderata that have achieved the status of fixed points in the debates about whether the canonical semantics is correct. Section 3 provides an opinionated overview of some of the main extant rivals to the canonical semantics, including Cariani, Kaufmann, and Kaufmann’s complex contextualism; Yalcin’s expressivism; Willer’s dynamic semantics; and Starr’s dynamic expressivism. Section 4 provides an assessment of each of the views discussed in terms of the desiderata introduced in section 2. Section 5 is an overview of remaining issues that require more attention in the literature.