Episode 128: Melissa Fusco discusses free choice permission
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What is the free‑choice permission puzzle and why does it seem to contradict standard modal logic?
Hello, Elucidations listeners. I'm Ben, an intern with the Elucidations podcast. Today on Elucidations, we sit down with Melissa Fusco, assistant professor of philosophy at Columbia University, to bring you a puzzle, the puzzle of free choice effects. If you were a guest at my home and I said to you, you may have tea or coffee, it would be very natural for you to draw the conclusion that you have a choice. That is, it would be natural for you to think that what I said entails you may have tea and you may have coffee. Similarly, if we were talking about our friend Matt, and I said to you, Matt might speak German or French, a natural conclusion to draw would be that what I said entails that Matt might speak German and Matt might speak French.
However, according to the standard vanilla theory of what the sentences you may have tea or coffee and Matt might speak German or French literally mean, you'd be wrong to draw these conclusions. The standard theory holds that you may have tea or coffee does not entail you may have tea and you may have coffee, and that Matt might speak German or French does not entail that Matt might speak German and Matt might speak French. The fact that people do indeed draw these inferences is the puzzle of free choice effects. There are two ways you might go from here. You might try to change the standard theory, but this is a difficult thing to do. Or, alternatively, you might think, yeah, you may have coffee or tea doesn't really entail you may have coffee and you may have tea.
The reason the hearer wants to draw those conclusions is on the basis of some kind of reasoning about what I, the speaker, intended to communicate based on the sentence I chose. In this episode, Professor Fusco opts for the first option and gives her own theory of the literal content of You May Have Coffee or Tea. If that sounds interesting, keep listening to hear more.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations. I'm Matt Teichman, and with me today is Melissa Fusco, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, and she is here to discuss Free Choice Permission. Melissa Fusco, welcome.
Hi, thanks for having me.
So free choice permission is a really interesting sort of linguistic and logical puzzle that first arose in the 70s and which people have been, I guess, kind of discussing, especially recently in the last like 20 years. It's been more and more interest in it. What exactly is the puzzle of free choice permission?
Well, the puzzle of free choice permission is an unexpected inference that people make on the basis of sentences that involve a weak or diamond type modal, like may or might or can in English.
Like possibly?
Possibly disjunction under the scope of that modal. Or there's some controversy about whether it needs to be under the scope.
So like when you're using might and or at the same time?
Yeah, so for example, if I say, I'll use an example with may because that's permission. So one of the original titles of the puzzle is the puzzle of free choice permission. If I say you may have coffee or tea, what I say seems to entail that you may have coffee and you may have tea. Not necessarily both, but that you have a choice. So both disjuncts are individually permissible. Sometimes it's a little hard to see why that inference is puzzling.
It seems natural, right? It seems
very natural. So part of what comes out of studying a modal logic or a classical logic and then modal logic is that certain inferences that we make all the time become more surprising than they would have seemed at first because they are not predicted to be valid on the semantics that you learn from those textbooks or in those courses. So I think actually one of the best ways of understanding why free choice permission, a positive entailment, in other words, something that does seem to be entailed by something that you said, why that's mysterious comes from looking at the sort of negative half of that, which is that certain inferences don't seem valid that are predicted to be valid on the classical semantics.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the free‑choice permission puzzle and why does it seem to contradict standard modal logic?
0:00–7:00
2
How does the waiter’s ‘you may have coffee or tea’ example illustrate the free‑choice effect?
7:00–12:26
3
Why can’t the standard normal modal logic derive the inference from ‘may P or Q’ to ‘may P’ and ‘may Q’?
12:26–17:03
4
What is Ross’s puzzle and how does it relate to the free‑choice permission problem?
17:03–21:20
5
How does two‑dimensional modal logic distinguish between automatic truth and necessary truth?
21:20–26:02
6
What is the ‘bowtie’ claim and how does it illustrate the contingent a‑priori in two‑dimensional semantics?
26:02–31:05
7
How does the distinction between diagonal and horizontal consequence explain why disjunction introduction isn’t necessary?
31:05–35:40
8
What are the broader implications of Fusco’s approach for reconciling intuitive inferences with deontic logic?
35:40–41:17
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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