Ought of order

Stephen Finlay argues in this chapter that Angelika Kratzer’s influential introduction of an ordering source parameter into the semantics for natural language modals was a mistake, at least for English normative modals such as ‘ought’. A simpler semantics in a dyadic framework, motivated by the need for a satisfactory treatment of instrumental (or ‘anankastic’) conditionals, also provides the resources for a better accommodation of gradability and ‘weak necessity’, information-sensitivity, and conflicts, with three moves: (i) an end-relational analysis of normative modality, (ii) an analysis of ‘ought’ or ‘weak necessity’ in terms of most, and (iii) an appeal to the same pragmatic resources utilized by Kratzer. The chapter ends with metasemantic observations about what we should want from a semantics for ‘ought’.