Deontic Modality

An extraordinary amount of recent work by philosophers of language, meta-ethicists, and semanticists has focused on the meaning and function of language expressing concepts having to do with what is allowed, forbidden, required, or obligatory, in view of the requirements of morality, the law, one's preferences or goals, or what an authority has commanded: in short, deontic modality.

This volume presents new work on the much-discussed topic of deontic modality by leading figures in the philosophy of language, meta-ethics, and linguistic semantics. The papers tackle issues about the place of decision and probability theory in the semantics of deontic modality, the viability of standard possible worlds treatments of the truth conditions of deontic modal sentences, the possibility of dynamic semantic treatments of deontic modality, the methodology of semantics for deontic modals, and the prospects for representationalist, expressivist, and inferentialist treatments of deontic modality.

Nate Charlow, University of Toronto,Matthew Chrisman, University of Edinburgh

Nate Charlow works primarily on language, semantics, and related issues in meta-ethics and epistemology. He wrote a dissertation on imperatives (and deontic modals) at the University of Michigan, and has taught at the University of Toronto since 2011. His interest in imperatives and deontic modals is both linguistic and philosophical. He has published on the a priori; the semantics of conditionals, imperatives, and modals; and Expressivism.


Matthew Chrisman has taught Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh since 2006, before which he did his PhD at the University of North Carolina. He works primarily on ethical theory, philosophy of language, and epistemology. He has publishedThe Meaning of 'Ought' with Oxford University Press and articles in journals including theJournal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, and Philosophers' Imprint.