Natural language contains a variety of means for expressing possibilities consistent with what is known. Particularly well-studied among them are the epistemic modal auxiliaries "might" and "must": (1) a. Ann: "Where is Peter?" b. Mary: "He {might/must} be in his office." There is broad agreement that…

Common sense is a dynamic concept and it is natural that our (statistical) common sense lags behind the development of statistical science. What is not so easy to understand is why common sense lags behind as much as it does. We conduct a survey among Japanese students and provide examples and tentative explanations of a number of statistical…

This study explores the epistemic considerations that seemed to govern thirty-one Indian teachers' beliefs while teaching certain concepts of probability, especially using random generators. It focuses on knowing how these teachers make transitions between the different interpretations of probability, namely, Logical (sometimes also known as…

This article presents a series of three experiments investigating the processing of nested epistemic expressions, utterances containing two epistemic modals in one clause, such as "he 'certainly may' have forgotten." While some linguists claim that in a nested epistemic expression one modal is semantically embedded within the scope of…