Entailments are Cancellable

Several philosophers have recently claimed that if a proposition is cancellable from an uttered sentence then that proposition is not entailed by that uttered sentence. The claim should be a familiar one. It has become a standard device in the philosopher's tool‐kit. I argue that this claim is false. There is a kind of entailment—which I call “modal entailment”—that is context‐sensitive and, because of this, cancellable. So cancellability does not show that a proposition is not entailed by an uttered sentence. I close the paper by describing an implication this has for a disagreement between J. L. Austin and Grice concerning the relation between felicity and truth.[Note 1. The research of this paper was funded by grant ...]