Abstract
This paper offers a novel conversational implicature account of the pragmatic sensitivity of knowledge attributions. Developing an account I first suggested elsewhere (Locke, Inquiry 57:28–54, 2014b) and independently proposed by Lutz (in Synthese 191:1717–1740, 2014), this paper explores the idea that the relevant implicatures are generated by a constitutive relationship between believing a proposition and a disposition to treat that proposition as true in practical deliberation. I argue that while this view has a certain advantage over standard implicature accounts of pragmatic sensitivity, it comes with a significant concession to proponents of pragmatic encroachment. On the account offered here, knowledge attributions have locally-pragmatically-sensitive implicatures because they have non-locally-pragmatically-sensitive entailments. The view thus represents a unique and powerful hybrid of these two approaches to the pragmatic sensitivity of knowledge attributions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
While this paper will take pragmatic sensitivity for granted, it is an open empirical question whether our willingness to make and accept knowledge attributions really does depend on pragmatic factors. Empirical research on this question has recently been conducted by Feltz and Zarpentine (2010), May et al. (2010), Buckwalter (2010), Pinillos (2011), Sripada and Stanley (2012), and Buckwalter and Schaffer (2015). The results of these studies have been mixed. Buckwalter and Schaffer (2015) provide a nice summary.
Proponents of encroachment approaches include Hawthorne (2004), Stanley (2005), Fantl and McGrath (2007, 2009a, b), Hawthorne and Stanley (2008), Schroeder (2012a, b) and Ross and Schroeder (2014). On my way of dividing things up, Weatherson’s (2005) view also counts as a pragmatic encroachment view (see fn. 4).
Following Ross and Schroeder (2014), I use the label ‘pragmatic encroachment’ in a somewhat broad fashion. On my usage, the label applies to any view according to which the (or even a) relation picked out by ‘knows’ is pragmatically sensitive. Take, for example, Weatherson’s (2005) view, according to which what you believe constitutively depends on the features of your choice situation. Assuming that what you know constitutively depends on what you believe, Weatherson’s view counts as a version of the pragmatic encroachment account, as I am using the term. On Weatherson’s own, narrower usage of the term, only views according to which pragmatics encroach into knowledge specifically—that is, encroach into knowledge without encroaching into belief, truth, or justification—count as pragmatic encroachment accounts. Since the distinction between pragmatic encroachment accounts in the broader sense and pragmatic encroachment accounts in the narrower sense is not a distinction that will concern us here, I have chosen to use the term in the broader sense. Thanks to Jennifer Nagel for reminding me that some philosophers use the label in the narrower sense.
DeRose (1998, 2002) refers to implicature accounts as ‘Warranted Assertability Maneuvers’ or ‘WAMs’. Unger (1984) was the first to explicitly distinguish implicature accounts from contextualist accounts. Contemporary proponents of implicature accounts include Rysiew (2001, 2007), Brown (2006), and Lutz (2014), all of whose views will be discussed below.
Ross and Schroeder name this thesis ‘the reasoning-disposition account of belief’ (my emphasis). I have chosen to use the term ‘thesis’ instead so that we can clearly distinguish this thesis from the account of pragmatic sensitivity that Ross and Schroeder build on top of it. It is important to distinguish the thesis from the account built on top of it because Lutz (2014) builds a different account of pragmatic sensitivity on top of this same thesis.
In my earlier paper, I formulated this principle in terms of having an ‘indefeasible disposition to treat p as true’ rather than in terms of ‘being prepared to treat p as true’. I now think that the former is a misleading label for what I have in mind. Please see section three below for more discussion. I owe thanks to an anonymous referee for pushing me to get clearer on this issue.
Readers who use ‘pragmatic encroachment’ in the narrower sense described in fn. 4 might find this sentence a bit odd. Please see fn. 4 for explanation.
Ross and Schroeder are not the first to attempt an account along this general line. Previous proposals, however, have focused on an alleged constitutive connection between belief and degree of credence (Weatherson 2005; Ganson 2008; Fantl and McGrath 2009a). Ross and Schroeder reject this alleged connection, positing a connection between belief and a disposition to treat as true in its stead.
To make this a bit more concrete, we can imagine Bridget drawing up a standard decision table. If no column (or columns) on the table represents the possibility that the coin lands on edge, then she is evaluating her options by the same procedure she would evaluate them conditional on the proposition that the coin will not land on edge.
For convenience, I will often use the phrase ‘S treats p as true in C’ as shorthand for the more precise phrase ‘S treats p as true in her deliberation in C about what to do in C’.
By ‘acting as if p’, Ross and Schroeder mean ‘acting in the manner that would be rationally optimal conditional on the supposition that p’ (2014, p. 4).
Suppose that knowledge that p requires some degree of epistemic certainty d less than absolute epistemic certainty. If d does not depend on one’s choice situation, then by simply making the stakes high enough, we can create a choice situation where p is epistemically certain to degree d for S and yet it is not rationally permissible for S to act as if p in C. This would be a violation of the knowledge-action principle. Hence, on the assumption of falliblism, the knowledge-action principle implies pragmatic encroachment.
Elsewhere (2015), I argue at length against the knowledge-action principle and in favor of an alternative principle.
Not everyone agrees that cases like Birth are convincing counterexamples to the knowledge-action principle. Ichikawa (2012), for example, contends that arguments from such examples rest on implicit assumptions about ‘what reasons are sufficient for [rationalizing] what actions’. In the case of Birth, the argument might seem to rest on the assumption that being born in England is a sufficient reason for Liz to take the bet. Ichikawa argues that a defender of the knowledge-action principle can, with at least some plausibility, deny this assumption. I deal with Ickikawa’s objection at length elsewhere Locke (2014a).
Another way one might try to defend the knowledge-action principle is to claim that the fact that Liz is being presented with such a bet provides Liz with undercutting/rebutting evidence for her belief that she was born in England. Fortunately, the details of the case can be specified in various ways such that this is not the case. We can, for example, stipulate that the person offering the bet is under contract to do so, perhaps as a result of some highly unlikely earlier development. If the details are filled in properly, it will be highly implausible that his offering the bet to Liz provides her with any undercutting/rebutting evidence for her belief that she was born in England.
The argument I have just given is aimed specifically at Ross and Schroeder’s encroachment account. This argument does not, however, undermine all encroachment accounts, and it is not intended to do so.
See fn. 7.
And it certainly doesn’t mean that one has ‘made preparations’ to \({\upphi }\) in that situation.
In defense of his analysis of counterfactuals in terms of similarity of possible worlds, Lewis argued as follows.
It may be said that... the notion of comparative overall similarity of worlds is hopelessly unclear, and so no fit foundation for the clarification of counterfactuals or anything else. I think the objection is wrong. ‘Unclear’ is unclear: does it mean ‘ill-understood’ or does it mean ‘vague’? Ill-understood notions are bad primitives because an analysis by means of them will be an ill-understood analysis. (It may yet be better than no analysis at all.) But comparative overall similarity is not ill-understood. It is vague—very vague—in a well-understood way. Therefore it is just the sort of primitive that we must use to give a correct analysis of something that is itself undeniably vague. (2001, p. 91)
An alternative would be to relativize it to what is normal for the agent’s group, or, alternatively again, the agent’s species.
To be sure, they might be justified in having the same level of confidence that it will rain today. Please see fn. 21.
On p. 1725 Lutz claims that the sentence “In C, if S knows that p, then S is justified to treat p as true in her practical reasoning” is simply the contrapositive of “In C, if it is rationally impermissible for S to act as if p, then S does not know that p.”
Unger’s explanation of how this implicature works is extremely concise. On p. 52, Unger references ‘the appropriate psychological complications’, without describing what these are. Here Unger is referring to the sorts of psychological mechanisms he described in Chapter 1, where he uses the term ‘flat’, rather than ‘knows’, as his primary example. See especially p. 9.
\(\hbox {TK}_\mathrm{TT}\) is a strengthened version of the so-called ‘safety’ condition on knowledge, according to which S knows that p only if S is right about whether p in all nearby worlds in which S believes that p (Sosa 1999). \(\hbox {TK}_\mathrm{TT}\), by contrast, requires S to be right about p in all nearby worlds, regardless of whether S believes p or not-p in each of those worlds. See Comesaña (2005) for critical discussion.
One particular version of \(\hbox {TK}_\mathrm{PE}\) is Rysiew’s (2001) relevant alternatives approach to knowledge, where the set of relevant alternatives is fixed independently of one’s current choice situation.
A helpful reviewer notes that, despite being an encroachment account, the view offered here in a certain respect ‘cuts against’ the standard intuitions used to support encroachment accounts. Suppose, for example, that Hannah faces the decision of whether to offer someone with a peanut allergy a certain sandwich, and that Hannah has no stronger evidence than a somewhat vague memory of the sandwich being made from almond butter. Standard encroachment accounts will hold that in a case like this, Hannah does not know that the sandwich does not contain peanuts. But if Hannah normally faces only low-stakes choice situations where such issues are relevant, then, on the account offered here, Hannah may well know that the sandwich does not contain peanuts, even in this high-stakes scenario. So, in this sense, the account offered here cuts against the standard intuitions used to support an encroachment account: it allows that those intuitions are mistaken. But this is merely a consequence of the fact that the account offered here is a non-standard encroachment account: it is an encroachment account that offers an implicature approach to the relevant intuitions. By accounting for the intuitions standardly used in support of standard encroachment accounts, the account offered here thus, like any implicature account of pragmatic sensitivity, gains support from those intuitions, despite the fact that it allows that what we find intuitive might be literally false, and what we find unintuitive might be literally true.
References
Brown, J. (2006). Contextualism and warranted assertability manoeuvers. Philosophical Studies, 130, 407–435.
Brown, J. (2008). Knowledge and practical reasoning. Philosophy Compass, 3, 1135–1152.
Buchak, L. (2014). Belief, credence, and norms. Philosophical Studies, 169, 285–311.
Buckwalter, W. (2010). Knowledge isn’t closed on Saturday: A study in ordinary language. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1, 395–406.
Buckwalter, W., & Schaffer, J. (2015). Knowledge, Stakes, and Mistakes. Nous, 49, 201–234.
Comesaña, J. (2005). Unsafe knowledge. Synthese, 146, 395–404.
DeRose, K. (1992). Contextualism and knowledge attributions. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 54, 513–529.
DeRose, K. (1998). Contextualism: An explanation and defense. In J. Greco & E. Sosa (Eds.), Blackwell guide to epistemology. Oxford: Blackwell.
DeRose, K. (2002). Assertion, knowledge, and context. Philosophical Review, 111, 167–203.
Fantl, J., & McGrath, M. (2007). On pragmatic encroachment in epistemology. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 65, 558–589.
Fantl, J., & McGrath, M. (2009a). Evidence, pragmatics, and justification. Philosophical Review, 111, 67–94.
Fantl, J., & McGrath, M. (2009b). Knowledge in an uncertain world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Feltz, A., & Zarpentine, C. (2010). Do you know more when it matters less? Philosophical Psychology, 23, 683–706.
Ganson, D. (2008). Evidentialism and pragmatic constraints on outright belief. Philosophical Studies, 139, 441–458.
Hawthorne, J. (2004). Knowledge and lotteries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hawthorne, J., & Stanley, J. (2008). Knowledge and action. Knowledge Norms and Acting Well Thought: The Journal of Philosophy, 1, 49–55.
Ichikawa, J. (2012). Knowledge norms and acting well. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, 1, 49–55.
Lewis, D. (2001). Counterfactuals. Malden: Blackwell Publishers.
Lutz, M. (2014). The pragmatics of pragmatic encroachment. Synthese, 191, 1717–1740.
Locke, D. (2014a). Knowledge Norms and Assessing Them Well. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, 3, 80–89.
Locke, D. (2014b). The decision-theoretic lockean thesis. Inquiry, 57, 28–54.
Locke, D. (2015). Practical Certainty. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 90, 72–95.
May, J., Sinnott-Armstrong, W., Hull, J. G., & Zimmerman, A. (2010). Practical interests, relevant alternatives, and knowledge attributions: An empirical study. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1, 265–273.
Pinillos, N. Á. (2011). Some recent work in experimental epistemology. Philosophy Compass, 6, 675–688.
Ross, J., & Schroeder, M. (2014). Belief, credence, and pragmatic encroachment. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 88(2), 259–288.
Rysiew, P. (2001). The context-sensitivity of knowledge attributions. Nous, 35, 477–514.
Rysiew, P. (2007). Speaking of knowing. Nous, 41, 627–662.
Schroeder, M. (2012a). Stakes, withholding, and pragmatic encroachment on knowledge. Philosophical Studies, 160, 265–285.
Schroeder, M. (2012b). The ubiquity of state-given reasons. Ethics, 122, 457–488.
Sosa, E. (1999). How to defeat opposition to Moore. Nous, 33, 141–153.
Sripada, C., & Stanley, J. (2012). Empirical tests of interest—relative invariantism. Episteme, 9, 3–26.
Stanley, J. (2005). Knowledge and practical interests. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Unger, P. (1984). Philosophical relativity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Weatherson, B. (2005). Can we do without pragmatic encroachment? Philosophical Perspectives, 19, 417–443.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Locke, D. Implicature and non-local pragmatic encroachment. Synthese 194, 631–654 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0965-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0965-0