Luck and Metasemantics

Abstract In a series of works, Duncan Pritchard has defended a modal account of luck. On this account, events are the things that are lucky or not. For an event to be lucky is for it to occur in the actual world but, keeping the initial conditions for the event fixed, for there to be close possible worlds in which the event doesn’t occur. I intend to take on Pritchard’s modal account of luck here without argument. The question that concerns me here is whether the notion of luck has significant application in philosophy of language. I argue that it does. Specifically, in recent work I have defended an account of how contextually sensitive expression that are not pure indexicals, like deictic pronouns, tense, possessives, modals and so on, secure semantic values in context. I call such an account a metasemantics for the relevant expressions. In the present chapter, I argue that in a case where a hearer forms a true belief about the semantic value of a contextually sensitive expression, where my metasemantics assigns the semantic value in context to the expression, there are no nearby worlds that share the initial conditions of the actual world of utterance where that true belief is not formed. That is, the event of forming the true belief is not lucky. I claim that other metasemantic accounts do not have this property and that the fact that mine does is an argument in its favor.