What difference might and may make

Synthese 192 (2):405-429 (2015)
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Abstract

How does your information change when you learn that something might be the case, where the modal “might” is epistemic? On the orthodox view, a proposition is added to your information base; on the view defended here, no propositions are added to your information base but some are removed from it. I argue that Stephen Yablo’s recent attempt to define this removal operation as a kind of propositional subtraction fails, offer a definition of my own in terms of the part–whole relations between the truthmakers of the propositions one accepts, and argue that a deontic analogue of this account solves a problem about permission posed long ago by David Lewis

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Gerhard Nuffer
Reed College

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References found in this work

A World of States of Affairs.D. M. Armstrong - 1996 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction.Gideon Rosen - 2010 - In Bob Hale & Aviv Hoffmann (eds.), Modality: metaphysics, logic, and epistemology. qnew York: Oxford University Press. pp. 109-135.
Assertion.Robert Stalnaker - 2013 - In Maite Ezcurdia & Robert J. Stainton (eds.), The Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary in Philosophy. Peterborough, CA: Broadview Press. pp. 179.

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