Reasoning with uncertainty and epistemic modals

2014-06-23My dissertation presents complementary views of reasoning with uncertainty and communicating in situations of reasoning with uncertainty. Reasoning with uncertainty proceeds from the possibilities an agent takes as options, rather than those that are merely consistent with her information or that she has positive credence in. I develop a descriptive and normative picture of such reasoning. This view of reasoning informs my account of epistemic communication, according to which agents typically use epistemic 'might'-sentences to coordinate collective reasoning with uncertainty. They do so by indirectly expressing attitudes of taking a proposition as an option in reasoning. This view of the pragmatics of epistemic communication is compatible with the traditional theory of the semantics of such sentences. Furthermore, it is able to solve a number of challenges raised for that theory by focusing on what speakers typically use epistemic sentences to do—rather than focusing on the meanings of these sentences