Dean McHugh

, Edinburgh/NYU

This talk brings together two ideas. First, that statements under a modal are interpreted as conditional antecedents. ‘Possibly A’ states that if A were true, there would be some case where the relevant ideals are met. Dually, ‘necessarily A’ states that if A were false, there would be no case where the relevant ideals are met. Second, conditional antecedents are interpreted via sets of alternatives, with some items—such as disjunction and ‘any’—introducing multiple alternatives. Combining them returns, in a uniform and automatic way, a solution to three challenges facing the standard theory of modality: free choice inferences, independence inferences, and counterexamples to substitution of logical equivalents.