Abstract:
Many English modals exhibit what has been called "imperative force": as
Charles Stevenson puts it, "the major part of one's purpose [in using them]
is to lead the hearer to satisfy [a] want." But it has long been unclear
what grounds imperative force in the English modal system.
This paper starts by trying to get clear about which features of English
modals should be counted as imperative force. I argue that it's helpful to
adopt a broader notion of imperative force than is familiar from the
linguistics literature. On this way of thinking, uses of both strong and
weak modals can have imperative force, in the sense that both strong and
weak modals can be used to make changes to ordering sources. I also argue
that a use of an English modal has imperative force only if the use is
subjective (in, roughly, John Lyons' sense), and that some English modals
select for subjective ordering sources, some prefer objective ordering
sources, and some are very flexible.
My view has two nice consequences. First, it makes available some
non-semantic explanations of phenomena commonly taken to motivate
non-descriptivist semantics for deontic modals. Second, it allows us to
explain away some putative cases of consistent moral dilemmas expressed
with strong modals. In such cases, I argue, the modals are not interpreted
subjectively, and because of this they can be indexed to ordering sources
that are not jointly satisfiable. These cases are thus not counterexamples
to the hypothesis that agglomeration is valid for strong modals but invalid
for weak modals.