A talk by Ramiro Caso, a philosopher/linguist visiting us from Buenos Aires.

Towards a dynamic account of deontic modals

I investigate the semantic and pragmatic behavior of deontic modals from a dynamic perspective. Pragmatically, deontic modals exhibit complex anchoring patterns that depend both on whose information state and whose preference ordering are taken as relevant, giving rise to distinct patterns of rejection and disagreement. Moreover, the assertion of a bare deontic modal sentence carries a performative dimension: upon acceptance, a new obligation or practical commitment is attributed to the relevant deliberative agent. In the domain of semantics, reasoning involving defeasible obligations, contrary-to-duty obligations, and obligations under epistemic uncertainty, display distinctive non-classical traits, calling for a non-monotonic treatment of the entailment relation. I explore the extent to which these phenomena can be accounted for by modeling deontic modals as tests on information states.