How to do things with modals

According to a prominent line of thought, epistemic possibility claims do not communicate propositions; instead, they are proposals to leave certain possibilities open. This idea is at the heart of recent arguments that, to make sense of the dynamics of epistemic modality, we must reject the contextualist account of conversational dynamics, on which the fundamental role of assertions—including “might”‐claims—is to communicate information. I argue, on the contrary, that we can capture the dynamics of epistemic modality within the contextualist framework by taking the content of “might”‐claims to be determined by the prospective common attitudes of the conversants.