Janice Dowell is an Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Abstract: Recently, some philosophers have argued that Angelika Kratzer’s canonical contextualist semantics for modal expressions cannot explain the use of deontic modals to express normative disagreement or to convey practical advice. Here I show how a flexibly contextualist account of modals is able to explain a range of puzzle cases. The key to solving the puzzles is to supplement Kratzer’s formal semantic account with an account of how context selects values for a modal’s parameters. On the account defended here, context determines a modal proposition in part by manifesting a speaker’s proposition-determining intention. This means that non-defective contexts satisfy a publicity constraint; they are capable of manifesting a speaker’s appropriate intention to a reasonable audience. The trick will be to develop a story about what determines the contents of a speaker’s intentions in a way that fits with a plausible explanation of how, in general, contexts are able to manifest those contents. I do that here.