An Acceptance Semantics for Stable Modal Knowledge

Abstract

We observe some puzzling linguistic data concerning ordinary knowledge ascriptions that embed an epistemic (im)possibility claim. We conclude that it is untenable to jointly endorse both classical logic and a pair of intuitively attractive theses: the thesis that knowledge ascriptions are always veridical and a `negative transparency' thesis that reduces knowledge of a simple negated `might' claim to an epistemic claim without modal content. We motivate a strategy for answering the trade-off: preserve veridicality and (generalized) negative transparency, while abandoning the general validity of contraposition. We survey and criticize various approaches for incorporating veridicality into domain semantics, a paradigmatic `information-sensitive' framework for capturing negative transparency and, more generally, the non-classical behavior of sentences with epistemic modals. We then present a novel information-sensitive semantics that successfully executes our favored strategy: stable acceptance semantics.