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https://harvard.zoom.us/j/552542370
The strength of ‘epistemic must’ statements has been long debated in the
theoretical literature and more recently in the experimental literature.
Here, we focus on Lassiter’s (2016; L16) assessment of von Fintel & Gillies
[F&G] (2010)’s hypothesis that ‘must p’ defines ‘p’ as a
deductive/necessary conclusion and L16’s hypothesis that ‘must p’ defines
‘p’ as an inductive/probabilistic conclusion. In this work, we report a
replication of L16 and 2 follow-up studies which encourage participants to
understand L16’s “agree”/“disagree” task as a truth-value judgment task
about the literal meaning of the statements. Our results support F&G’s
hypothesis over L16’s hypothesis.