Deontic Dualism
In a recent facebook thread, Josh Dever wrote: …permission-creating deontic modals (roughly) don't embed in a lot of environments. So "If you can have a cookie, you can have a brownie" can't be permission-creating for cookies, but can be (conditionally) for brownies. "Probably you can have a cookie" can't be permission-creating, but only permission-reporting… I suspect you can make the embedding facts work out with either (i) a semantic story on which there are two different modals or (ii) a pragmatic story on which permission-creation is a speech-acty consequence of using a solitary modal, and the embeddings stop the speech-actiness. I'm generally inclined to type-(i) explanations, but type-(ii) is kind of tempting here. To which Richard Stillman responded: If we hold that there are two different types of deontic modal (as opposed to two types of speech act that can be generated using one type of modal), will we have difficulty capt