1 Embedding Epistemic Modals

Seth Yalcin has pointed out some puzzling facts about the behaviour of epistemic modals in certain embedded contexts. For example, conditionals that begin ‘If it is raining and it might not be raining, … ’ sound unacceptable, unlike conditionals that begin ‘If it is raining and I don’t know it, …’. These facts pose a prima facie problem for an orthodox treatment of epistemic modals as expressing propositions about the knowledge of some contextually specified individual or group. This paper develops an explanation of the puzzling facts about embedding within an orthodox framework. 1. Yalcin’s data There is an old-fashioned, ‘propositionalist ’ account of epistemic modals on which ‘It might be the case that ϕ ’ and ‘It is possible that ϕ ’ are context-dependent sentences which express propositions about knowledge.1 A particular use of ‘It might be the case that ϕ’, whether bare or embedded, expresses a proposition roughly equivalent to those expressed by ‘α does not know that not ϕ’, or ‘α is not in a position to know that not ϕ’, where α refers to some relevan