Philosophy 793D - S- Deontic Modality: Puzzles

Consider claims like the following: "You should believe in accordance with the evidence." "Although you can skip the meeting, you ought to attend." "If you're going to spit on the sidewalk, you should at least spit away from people." We hear claims like these all the time, both in philosophy and in ordinary discourse. But how should we understand such claims? And what kinds of inferences do they license? These questions are not only interesting in themselves. They connect with a number of arguments made in the ethics and epistemology literatures, which hang on sometimes controversial assumptions about the logic of normative and evaluative language.
In this class we'll look at various attempts at giving a theory of the meaning and logic of words like "ought," "should," "can," "may," and so on, in philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and linguistics. Questions we will consider may include: Does possible world semantics suffice to capture the logical behavior of normative language? Should our semantics for normative language be sensitive to questions in normative ethics or decision theory? What is the relationship between deontic modals and conditionals? Relatedly, are there primitive conditional obligations? Could talk of "reasons" help shed light on the logic of permission and obligation? Is there a special, "deliberative" ought that is relevant to questions about what agents ought to *do* as opposed to what simply ought to be the case? Readings will include work by Kratzer, Fine, Cariani, Horty, Arregui, Lewis, Kolodny and MacFarlane, Broome, Zvolensky, Schroeder, among others. (This class won't presuppose any prior knowledge of these issues.)

Open to Graduate students only.