An Argument for a Strong Force Semantics of Believe

The English verb believe is usually taken to encode universal quantification over possibilities (Hintikka 1969) and thus it is predicted to carry a strong modal force. Faced with the intuition that believe feels weaker than uncontroversially strong modals like sure, Hawthorne, Rothschild, and Spectre (2016) instead propose that believe carries a weak modal force, requiring that the agent’s degree of certainty exceed some vague standard and drawing a parallel to relative gradable adjectives like tall. This contribution takes to heart the idea that believe is gradable but shows that its scale properties in fact argue against a weak force semantics: the scale of believe is upper-closed and so its default standard must be the scale maximum (Kennedy and McNally 2005, Kennedy 2007). This results in a strong modal force, suggesting that the felt weakness of believe is rooted in its “subjective” modal flavor (cf. Lyons 1977, Kratzer 1981) arising from the fact that believe maps propositions to degrees of credence.