Epistemic modals: A cross-theoretical approach

In recent years, the standard account of epistemic modal discourse has been criticized from two directions. Expressivists and dynamic semanticists argue that simple epistemic modal sentences should be understood as non-truth-conditional. Relativists hold that the truth values of epistemic modal sentences are determined by the features of their contexts of assessment. I argue below that one can integrate the core insights of these critical stances without falling into contradiction.