It is now fashionable to argue that a relativistic semantics is correct for predicates of personal taste (Lasersohn) and epistemic modals (MacFarlane, Egan, Hawthorne & Weatherson). One of our students, Tamina Stephenson, has a very nice relativistic paper in the MITWPL volume on New Work on Modality. In a recent conversation with her, I gave her the following example:

A: How’s that new brand of cat food you bought?
B: I think it tastes good, because the cat has eaten a lot of it.

The relativistic approaches expect that in embedding under “think”, the subject should become the judge for the taste predicate. But here, that is clearly not so.

It is interesting that the same freedom doesn’t seem to be there with epistemic “might”. Egan, Hawthorne and Weatherson describe the following scenario:

Ann is planning a surprise party for Bill. Unfortunately, Chris has discovered the surprise and told Bill all about it. Now Bill and Chris are having fun watching Ann try to set up the party without being discovered. Currently Ann is walking past Chris’s apartment carrying a large supply of party hats. She sees a bus on which Bill frequently rides home, so she jumps into some nearby bushes to avoid being spotted. Bill, watching from Chris’s window, is quite amused, but Chris is puzzled and asks Bill why Ann is hiding in the bushes. Bill says

“I might be on that bus.”

In this case, the judge for the “might” is not Bill but Ann. But note that Bill could not possibly say:

“I think I might be on that bus.”

That sentence says that for all Bill knows he is on the bus, which is absurd in the given scenario.

So, there seems to be a clear difference between taste predicates and epistemic “might”.