Melissa Fusco

My favored joint solution to the Puzzle of Free Choice Permission (Kamp 1973) and Ross’s Paradox (Ross 1941) involves (i) giving up the duality of natural language deontic modals, and (ii) moving to a two-dimensional propositional logic which has a classical Boolean character only as a special case. In this talk, I’d like to highlight two features of this radical view: first, the extent to which Boolean disjunction is imperiled by other natural language phenomena not involving disjunction, and second, the strength of the general position that natural language semantics must treat deontic, epistemic, and circumstantial modals alike.

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