Do de re necessities express semantic rules?

ABSTRACT

Amie Thomasson's Norms and Necessity offers a non-factualist theory of the language of metaphysical necessity, centering on the idea that statements of necessity express semantic norms. This article identifies a potential problem for the view by distinguishing two kinds of conditional necessity, investigates a solution derived from a well-known parallel pair of conditional necessities in deontic logic, but finds it is not up to the job. The last part of the paper suggests a different route, largely in keeping with the underlying ideas behind Thomasson's approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Modal normativism; deontic modals; expressivism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Actually, permissive imperatives are part of ordinary English: go ahead and castle as long as it isn’t into, out of, or through check and you haven’t yet moved the king or rook. But no doubt Thomasson is right that the modal language is expressively more powerful.

2 It wasn’t clear to me that this is enough, since the rules don’t seem to tell us how to infer negated Necessarily p sentences, so how will we ever reach the conclusion that Possibly not-p? Maybe we’ll assume Necessarily p for reductio?

3 See Dickie (2016), cited approvingly in the Thomasson chapter, for compelling examples supporting the idea that exactly what strange scenarios are epistemically possible is determined largely by pragmatics.

4 More likely (7) restricts the necessity modal by the protasis condition, as in Kratzer (1977); the difference won’t matter here.

5 I owe this suggestion to Chris Hill.

6 In Hindi, the bishop is called a camel. There are some exotic Indian chess sets that use camel figures for bishops – also elephants for rooks.

7 The main thrust of this idea is explained in Coppock (1984).