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Deontic Modality and the Semantics of Choice

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Deontic Modality and the Semantics of Choice Philosophers’ 1 volume 15, no. 28 1. Two Puzzles Imprint october 2015 Suppose I say to you (1) You may have the gin or the whiskey. may(G or W) As you help yourself to the latter, I cry, “Stop! You can’t have 2 DEONTIC whiskey.“ It seems that I have contradicted myself. For how, given (1), could your action have been impermissible? That we hear sentences like (1) MODALITY AND as communicating that you may have the gin, and you may have the 3 whiskey, is the puzzle, or paradox, of free choice permission. Free choice permission is usually glossed as a felt entailment from THE SEMANTICS OF a narrow-scope disjunction under may to a wide scope conjunction: (FC) may(f or y) ) (may f) ^ (may y) But more can be added to this characterization. Most speakers have the CHOICE strong intuition that while the permission in (1) communicates that one may choose the gin and one may choose the whiskey, it emphatically fails to communicate the permissibility of the corresponding narrow- scope conjunction, which would allow you to have both: (2) You may have the gin and the whiskey. Melissa Fusco may(G ^ W) . and perhaps even entails that (2) is false. This feature goes by the University of California, Berkeley name exclusivity: 1. Thanks to John MacFarlane, Seth Yalcin, Wes Holliday, Lara Buchak, Alex 2015 Kocurek, Stephen Darwall, Chris Barker, Jim Pryor, and two anonymous refer- © , Melissa Fusco ees at Philosophers’ Imprint for helpful feedback on this paper. For stimulating This work is licensed under a Creative Commons discussion, I am also indebted to audiences at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, New York University, and Magdalen College, Oxford. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License 2. For readability, and where it causes no confusion, I will be loose with use <www.philosophersimprint.org/015028/> and mention. 3. See Hans Kamp, “Free Choice Permission,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series 74 (1973) and G. H. von Wright, An Essay on Deontic Logic and the General Theory of Action (Amsterdam, North Holand, 1968). melissa fusco Deontic Modality and the Semantics of Choice 6 (Exclusivity) may(f or y) ; may(f ^ y) (5) I ought to post the letter or burn it. ought(P or B) This observation is embedded in the scholarship on free choice permis- 4 1 2 sion. The tension between ( ) and ( ) is usually glossed as a scalar Again, it appears that something has gone wrong. For (4) does not 5 implicature. seem to entail (5). That this entailment is classically valid, but feels 7 Here is a second puzzle. Consider a similar situation, in which I say intuitively invalid, is Ross’s Puzzle: to you (R) ought(f) ; ought(f or y) (3) You ought to post the letter. A straightforward explanation of what is wrong with the inference ought P from (4) to (5) is that the introduced disjunct (here, burning the letter) is You reason as follows: impermissible. Recent work on Ross’s puzzle has pursued this intuitive route, investigating various ways of working out the thought that a 4 ( ) I ought to post the letter. Ross sentence ought(f or y) entails that there must be something to ought 8 P be said, deontically speaking, for each of the embedded disjuncts. Therefore, (R+) ought(f or y) ) (may f) ^ (may y) This looks like a unification with free choice permission: disjunction under both ought and may carry what we can call an entailment to 9 4. Chris Barker (“Free Choice Permission as Resource-Sensitive Reasoning,” disjunct permissibility. Semantics and Pragmatics 3 (2010)) writes that FC sentences like (1) “never“ guarantee conjunctions like (2). The failure of (1) to entail (2) is also as- A simple variation on Ross’s puzzle, due to Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, sumed by Mandy Simons (“Dividing Things Up: The Semantics of Or and the suggests that there is yet more to say about Ross sentences. Sayre- 13 3 2005 Modal/Or Interaction,” Natural Language Semantics / ( )), who calls it McCord observes that, according to the hypothesis that disjunction a “consensus in the literature“. Danny Fox, an implicature theorist, makes his psychological explanation of free choice permission dependent on a hearer’s introduction is blocked in the scope of ought just in case the intro- 2 rejection of ( ) (“Free Choice and the Theory of Scalar Implicatures,” in duced disjunct is impermissible, it would follow that, if y is known to U. Sauerland and P. Stateva (eds.), Presupposition and Implicature in Composi- tional Semantics (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)). Fox’s official position be permissible, then thus includes an endorsement of the stronger inference we may call and-false: may(f or y) ): may(f ^ y). However, Fox expresses some reservations about this inference — and thus the fact that his explanation of free choice 6. The post-burn disjunction is Ross’s original. permission relies on it — in the last section of his paper. 7. Alf Ross, “Imperatives and Logic,” Theoria 7/1 (1941) 5. Both (FC) and (Exclusivity) have been analyzed as scalar implicatures, the 8. See especially Fabrizio Cariani, “‘Ought’ and Resolution Semantics,” Noûs former of an unusual, post-Gricean kind, in the wake of Kratzer & Shimoyama 47/3 (2013), and Daniel Lassiter, “Nouwen’s Puzzle and a Scalar Semantics (“Indeterminate Pronouns: The View from Japanese,” in Proceedings of the Third for Obligations, Needs, and Desires,” in Proceedings of SALT 21 (2011), and Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics (2002)); see especially Fox, op. cit., and Gen- Measurement and Modality: The Scalar Basis of Modal Semantics (Ph. D. diss.), New naro Chierchia, “Broaden Your Views: Implicatures of Domain Widening and York University, 2011. the ‘Logicality’ of Language,” Linguistic Inquiry 37/4 (2006). I present an ar- 9. This apparent connection between free choice and Ross is noted by, amongst gument analyses of (FC) in the Kratzer and Shimoyama vein elsewhere (“Free others, Kai von Fintel (“The Best We Can (Expect to) Get?: Challenges to the Choice Permission and the Counterfactuals of Pragmatics,” Linguistics and Phi- Classic Semantics for Deontic Modals“, 2012), Cariani, op. cit., pg. 20–21, and losophy 37/4 (2014)). von Wright himself (op. cit., pg. 22). philosophers’ imprint - 2 - vol. 15, no. 28 (october 2015) melissa fusco Deontic Modality and the Semantics of Choice ought f should entail ought(f or y) < ought f ^ ought y ought f or y ( ) both obligatory — too strong < may f ^ may y in context. But, Sayre-McCord argues, “ought(f or y) cannot legitimately be both (merely) permissible — too weak 10 < ought f ^ may y _ ought y ^ may f inferred from ought f even when y is perfectly permissible". His ( ) ( ) example is as follows: suppose it is taken for granted that it is perfectly one of each — (SM) fine for Ralph to go to the movies; The example suggests we should switch tracks, and try to directly (6) Ralph may go to the movies. characterize situations that are appropriately described by sentences may M of the form ought(f or y). Suppose that I have come down with a cold this morning and am too sick to host my housewarming party is true. It is also true that tomorrow night. It seems appropriate to say: (7) Ralph ought to pay back his loan. (9) I ought to cancel or postpone the party. ought L If (9) is true, then canceling the party has a certain deontic status (that Still, of being obligatory), provided that I do not postpone, and postponing the (8) Ralph ought to pay back his loan or go to the movies. party has a certain deontic status (that of being obligatory), provided 9 ought(M or L) that I do not cancel. That nothing at all is said by ( ) about the situation where I both postpone and cancel is shown by the fact that (9) can be sounds wrong; it does not seem to follow from (6) and (7). Call this true, even though the conjunction, postpone and cancel, has no positive normative status at all: it would be rude to my guests to postpone the (SM) may y ^ ought f ; ought(f or y) party only to cancel it later, and it’s impossible to cancel a party and Sometimes, disjunction introduction in the scope of a deontic modal then to postpone it. fails even when the introduced disjunct is permissible. I propose, then, to add to the data associated with Ross sentences Sayre-McCord’s observation seems to show that there is no para- like (9): the deontic status of the act described by each disjunct depends phrase for the ‘or’ in a Ross sentence in terms of the unconditional de- on whether the other one is performed. Starting with a Ross sentence ontic status of the disjuncts expressible in the object language — that as a premise, an agent can reason with future-directed conditionals is, in terms of the deontic status each disjunct has, considered indepen- like this: dently of the other one. (Conditionals-O) I ought to do (f or y) ) If I do not do f, I ought to do y; 10. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, “Deontic Logic and the Priority of Moral Theory,” Noûs 20/2 (1986), pg. 189. philosophers’ imprint - 3 - vol. 15, no. 28 (october 2015) melissa fusco Deontic Modality and the Semantics of Choice I ought to do (f or y) ) If I do not do y, I ought to do f. these modal environments. Table 1 gives an interim summary of the intuitions that constitute our data. In addition being a promising paraphrase of (9), (Conditionals-O) 8 helps us to precisify our discomfort with Sayre-McCord’s defective ( ), May: ought where disjunction introduction in the scope of is blocked, even (Failure of ‘or’ intro) may f ; may(f or y) though the introduced disjunct is permissible.
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