I’ve spent most of the last few weeks working with Andy Egan and John Hawthorne on a long paper on epistemic modals. Despite this paper’s length, there are many topics related to the behaviour of epistemic modals that we haven’t had a chance to discuss. The paper spends some time on the relation between epistemic modals and propositional attitude verbs, and a little on their interaction with temporal modifiers, but that’s about it, and there’s plenty more to discuss. Just getting the issues about tense right would be a paper in itself, and we don’t touch the interesting questions about the relationship between epistemic modals and quantifiers that Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou have said so much about.

The usual thing to do when you’ve got too many ideas for a paper is to write a book. The ‘idea overflow’ probably isn’t enough for us to write a book, but Andy and I thought there might be enough interest here to put together an edited collection of original papers on epistemic modals.

Epistemic modals have been the focus of recent work by semanticists (such as von Fintel and Iatridou), epistemologists (such as Keith DeRose) and logicians (such as Frank Veltman). But there have not been many connections between the work produced in these various fields, despite the fact that everyone is working on the same phenomena. One thing a book could do is encourage some interaction between these hitherto disparate groups.

Further, epistemic modals are an interesting testing ground for some big picture questions in philosophy of language. DeRose has suggested that a contextualist account of epistemic modals is plausible. In our paper Egan, Hawthorne and I look a little more favorably on a ‘relative truth’ approach of the kind pioneered by John MacFarlane. Some of the data suggests we’re all wrong and ‘might’ has no semantic role at all, but is rather a speech-act modifier. So debates about epistemic modals feed into much larger debate about the nature of language.

The upshot of all this was that we thought an edited collection would be a good idea. But such a book needs three classes of people to make it work. We would need

• People who would be interested in reading such a book
• People who would be interested in writing for such a book
• People who would be interested in publishing such a book

If you fall into any of these categories (especially the third!) let me know either by email (brian_weatherson at brown.edu) or through the comments board.