Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

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Author: search.filters.author.Kendrick, Jonathan CalebSubject: search.filters.subject.semantics

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    (2024) Kendrick, Jonathan Caleb; Williams, Alexander; Cariani, Fabrizio; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation argues that the interpretation of modals, expressions like “might,” “should,” and “must,” are constrained by their local context. For epistemic modals, local contexts bound the admissible domains of modal quantification. In Chapter 2, we use this fact to explain why epistemic “must” is weaker than the □ operator from epistemic modal logic. For root (i.e., non-deontic) modals, local contexts restrict the domain of quantification. In Chapter 3, we show this yields a solution to the Samaritan Paradox concerning why deontic modals do not inherit presuppositions under entailment. In Chapter 4, we propose a solution to the “if ?, ought ?” problem based on default logic. According to this solution, “ought”’s ordering source consists of default rules and the domain consists of the conclusion of the defaults triggered in the local context.