Deontic Modality

An extraordinary amount of recent work by philosophers of language, meta-ethicists, and semanticists has focused on the meaning and function of language expressing concepts having to do with what is allowed, forbidden, required, obligatory and so on, in view of the requirements of morality, the law, one’s preferences or goals, what an authority has commanded, etc.—deontic modality, for short.

This volume gathers together papers on the cutting edge of recent work on deontic modality by leading figures in the philosophy of language, meta-ethics, and linguistic semantics. The papers tackle issues about the place of decision and probability theory in the semantics of deontic modality, the viability of standard possible worlds treatments of the truth conditions of deontic modal sentences, the possibility of dynamic semantic treatments of deontic modality, the methodology of semantics for deontic modals, and the prospects for representationalist, expressivist, and inferentialist treatments of deontic modality.

It is remarkable for there to be such wide interdisciplinary interest in a topic like this, and it presents a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary engagement and collaboration. Beyond the aim of assembling a body of top-notch work on the topic, we hope this volume will set the stage for this sort of engagement and collaboration.