Alethic modality

Alethic modality is a linguistic modality which indicates logical necessity, possibility or impossibility.^[1]

Alethic modality is often associated with epistemic modality in research. However, it has been questioned whether this modality should be considered distinct from epistemic modality which denotes the speaker's evaluation or judgment of the truth. The criticism states that there is no real difference between "the truth in the world" (alethic) and "the truth in an individual's mind" (epistemic).^[2] An investigation has not found a single language in which alethic and epistemic modalities are formally distinguished, as by the means of a grammatical mood.^[3] In such a language, "A circle can't be square", "can't be" would be expressed by an alethic mood, whereas for "He can't be that wealthy", "can't be" would be expressed by an epistemic mood. As we can see, this is not a distinction drawn in English grammar.

"You can't give these plants too much water." is a well-known play on the distinction between this so-called alethic modality and (perhaps hortatory or injunctive) modality. The dilemma is fairly easily resolved when listening through paralinguistic cues and particularly suprasegmental cues (intonation). So while there may not be a morphologically based alethic mood, this does not seem to preclude the usefulness of distinguishing between these two types of modes. Alethic modality might then concern what are considered to be apodictic statements.

References

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