(And of course, ‘your version of SSI’ is IRI. So there’s a happy reading of your first language. :P )

I don’t think (b) in The Princess Bride story is inconsistent with saying that Westley knew that Buttercup was engaged. I think a large part of the context dependence of ‘might’ is that there’s some flexibility in which epistemic relation the salient person must stand in. The natural way (for someone who denies E=K) to read (b) is as saying not that Westley’s *knowledge* was consistent with Buttercup not being engaged, but as saying that his *evidence* was consistent with Buttercup not being engaged.

I’m not super confident about that last paragraph because I don’t really have a good grip on how tense-shifted epistemic modals work though. I find them a little mystifying actually…

Brian: good point, the argument as given doesn’t favor contextualism over the relevant kind of IRI. That’s slightly embarrassing, since I often take a pretty critical view of people who fail to make that distinction; I definitely should have been more careful.

However, it looks to me like a third-person version of the argument should be about as strong. Sometimes, we use epistemic modals to talk about somebody else’s evidential situation; it looks to me like we have the same flexibility to choose between ‘S knows p’ and ‘it might be that not-p’ (where that might is clearly meant to signal S’s epistemic situation — we can force this interpretation by talking about cases where we know p). For example, suppose we’re watching The Princess Bride for the hundredth time. Westley has heard an announcement that Buttercup is going to marry Humperdink, and truly believes, on this basis, that Buttercup is engaged to marry Humperdink. It seems to me that we could felicitously describe Westley’s situation in either of these ways: (a) “Westley came to confront Buttercup because he knew she was engaged to marry Humperdink”; (b) “Westley had good reason to believe that Buttercup was engaged to marry Humperdink. But of course, testimony is sometimes unreliable. It might’ve been that it was just a rumor — still, it was likely enough to make the trip worthwhile. And of course he ended up being right.” This kind of data, it seems to me, is just as strong as the data in the post. And I don’t see how the IRI view explains it.

Nate: I’m confused. Don’t your (1) and (2) just flatly contradict my premise one? I’m not sure I see how this connects to Brian’s point.

(1) both Kp and might(~p) are true/assertable in light of the information of c
(2) both Kp and might(~p) are true/assertable in light of the information of S

…if “information” is understood to exclude which alternatives are salient with respect to S (or c).