Abstract

Grice continues his project of proving the univocality of common modals by showing how a univocal structural representation can be applied to a certain class of alethic and practical acceptability statements that are at least sometimes valid, subject to license of the involved transitional inferences from a ‘Principle of Total Evidence’. Grice also shows that these acceptability statements can be modified to account for defeasible and non‐defeasible generalizations, which in turn can be utilized to account for a univocal set of modals such as ‘ought’ and ‘must’. The chapter closes with a discussion of the ‘Principle of Total Evidence’.