Juan Miguel López Munive (New College): 'Title TBA'
Abstract: A spectre is haunting philosophical logic - the spectre of the metalinguistic conception of modality. According to this view, modal notions are best conceived as predicates that apply to names of sentences (or to objects with sentence-like structure), rather than as sentential operators. Yet the main proponents of this view (e.g. Halbach et al. 2003, 2005; Halbach and Leigh 2024; Stern 2016; Nicolai and Stern 2021) do not make fully clear whether the project should be understood descriptively or normatively. Clarifying this is crucial for understanding the significance of the modal paradoxes discovered by Montague (1975). In this talk, I argue that the “metalinguistic turn” in modal logic is best understood in normative terms, and more precisely as a project of logical reconstruction in Leitgeb’s (forthcoming) sense. I elaborate on this interpretation and evaluate certain aspects of a formalization of partial modal predicates conceived as a logical reconstruction of modal notions and propositional attitudes.
