Suppose someone were to say, in perhaps appropriately fervent tones,

"Richard Nixon must get the Oxford Chair of Moral and Pastoral Theology". Depending on context, one might find three different interpretations, all of them falling within the volitive zone. (A) One might mean that it is vital (perhaps vital to the world, or to some microcosm which is momentarily taken as if it were the world), that RN should be established in this position. On this interpreta-tion, one would not be laying on any agent's shoulders an incumbency to see to it, that this happy state be realized, unless it were on the shoulders of someone with a reputation for total ineffectiveness in mundane affairs, like The Almighty. (B) On another interpretation, one would be invoking a supposed incumbency, perhaps an incumbency on 'us' (whoever 'us' might be) to secure the result. (C) On what might be a particularly natural interpretation, one would be charging Richard Nixon with an incumbency to secure his own election to this august chair. On both interpretations (B) and (C), one would be advancing the idea that it was necessary relative to some potential agent ('us' or RN) that RN obtain the chair.

On the alethic side, no such significant relativity is observable. One might mean by uttering the sentence that (for example) it is a one-horse race (a shoe-in) for RN; but that kind of necessity would not be relativized, except perhaps timidly to any person whatsoever as something which he (like everyone else) would have to admit, or alternatively to some particular person whose view it is that RN cannot but be chosen (and this is not an interesting interpreta-tion).