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SUMMARY:The language of higher-order uncertainty - Dan Lassiter\, Stanford
  University
DTSTART:20160421T153000Z
DTEND:20160421T173000Z
UID:TALK60918@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Jamie Douglas
DESCRIPTION:Epistemic modals have long been thought to display severe rest
 rictions in their embedding potential. In addition\, when they do embed it
  is often thought that the outer modal is vacuous – so that "It must be 
 possible that it's raining" just means "It's possible that it's raining". 
 Recently Moss (2015) has observed that\, in certain carefully elaborated c
 ontexts\, constructions with multiple epistemics like "It must be probable
  that ..." are intuitively acceptable and seem to express higher-order unc
 ertainty. I'll present some recent work examining the range and interpreta
 tion of such constructions in corpora\, and use the result to motivate a n
 ew probabilistic semantics that improves on both the classical interpretat
 ion from modal logic and Moss' proposal. This approach has interesting poi
 nts of connection with the use of causal models in psychology and with the
  question of how people represent (higher-order) uncertainty\, which I'll 
 discuss briefly in conclusion.
LOCATION:GR06-7\, English Faculty\, 9 West Road (Sidgwick Site)
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