Certain puzzling behavior of modal expressions in discourse has convinced a growing number of theorists that language of modality does not factor in truth-conditions, and that the story of how thought, communication and action interact must be modified to allow for the non-truth-conditional aspects of meaning. I argue that the lesson to draw from the puzzling behavior of modals is not that we need to abandon truth-conditional accounts of meaning, but that we need a more sophisticated account of how the meaning of modal utterances interacts with discourse context. I shall argue that, though modal expressions do express truth-conditions, this is only one aspect of their meaning; in addition, they have a layer of meaning that actively impacts the state of the discourse context, in a way that is crucial for explaining precisely their distinctive behavior that has lead many towards pessimism about the truth-conditional meaning