Abstract
This chapter tries to understand the proper notion of evidence to use in the semantic analysis of natural language evidentials. I review various notions of justification from the epistemological literature, and consider how they relate to the use of evidentials and related constructions. I then consider how (some) evidentials behave under Gettier scenarios. The conclusion is that the required notion of evidence is one which is weaker than (many accounts of) knowledge, involves increase of speaker credence, but which is necessarily first-person. I thus settle on a view based on a self-ascription of probability increase due to knowledge of propositions that increase credence after conditionalization.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The use of the choice function here is meant to account for quantificational variability in the St’at’imcets evidentials. See Matthewson et al. (2007) for details.
- 2.
A reviewer observes that similar worries arise for theories of modality that assume an ordering source or modal base (e.g. Kratzer 1981): without a definition of priorities, preferences, or laws, how can we have a completely satisfying theory of deontic modality?
- 3.
I will not have much to say about hearsay evidentials here; McCready and Ogata (2007) analyzed them as simple tests for the existence of an ‘observation sentence’ in the Quinean sense (Quine 1960) of hearsay type, with content identical to that in the scope of the evidential. See McCready (2011) for some additional discussion.
- 4.
- 5.
See the chapters in Brown and Herman (2011) for extensive and interesting recent discussion of this issue.
- 6.
These cases are modeled after an example in Williamson (2000).
- 7.
- 8.
I assume a probabilistic account for consistency with the previous (Bayesian) discussion; one could also transpose this view to a more linguistically-traditional possible worlds-based picture of attitudes, so that
$$ [\![B_a\phi ]\!]=1\ \mathrm {iff}\ \frac{{ card}(\{w':{R_a}(w,w')\ \& \ \phi (w')\})}{{ card}(\{w':{R_a}(w,w')\})}\succ s, $$i.e. the proportion of the agent’s epistemically accessible worlds verifying \(\phi \) exceeds some contextually specified degree. The requirement for knowledge would then be to further increase the required proportion (to something approximating 1) or to add extra conditions, as in the main text below. I do not see much to choose between the two pictures, at least for the present application.
- 9.
Here, I intend a situation in which the justification is undermined but the attitude holder remains willing to assent to the proposition, or willing to act as if it were true, on the assumption that guiding action is a primary role of knowledge as claimed by Fantl and McGrath (2009). The precise characterization of this undermining is nontrivial; in what follows, I will talk about knowledge being destroyed or eliminated by the undermining of evidence, but, as a reviewer notes, given that the basis for assuming that knowledge is eliminated is an unwillingness to assent to a knowledge attribution or to use the term ‘know’, the possibility that there is only a change in linguistic behavior cannot be eliminated. This observation raises the question of the relationship between linguistic evidence and epistemological conclusions, a highly fraught issue which I cannot address in the present chapter.
- 10.
The linguistically minded reader may now be wondering why we need to go to all this trouble. After all, isn’t knowledge factive, and belief not? That means that the object of knowledge is presupposed, but not so in the case of belief. If this is so, then why must we worry about justification and the foundations of knowledge? There is some initial plausibility to this objection, but it rests on a confusion. The verbs know and believe are factive and not factive respectively, but here we are not interested in knowledge or belief as it is linguistically expressed. Rather, we are interested in evidence, as the object required for the felicitous use of evidentials. This content is not explicitly expressed in language. To find out its properties, we must take a more indirect route.
- 11.
An alternate version of the test, suggested by a reviewer, involves a sequence of statements in the second person, followed by a question about acceptability of the use of an evidential sentence:
-
Scenario: You just went outside and saw that the street is wet. But you then wonder if maybe you are dreaming and didn’t (really) see a street at all.
In this scenario, can you truthfully(/reasonably/felicitiously) say: It rained last night–Evid\(_{inf}\)?
The results of this test seem the same as what we find with the version in the main text.
-
- 12.
This position is in opposition to the knowledge-norm view of Williamson (2000) and others. On this view, speakers should, normatively, only assert the things they know. I believe that this view is far too strong—it is tantamount to forcing people to have full credence in any content they assert, which is virtually impossible in the real world.
- 13.
These varieties of externalism are set up by Fantl and McGrath specifically for the analysis of knowledge, and so are adapted slightly to the equivalents for justification, our concern here.
- 14.
As in other societies, excessive use of honorific speech or ‘honorific behavior’ is naturally interpreted ironically.
- 15.
This issue is a difficult one for theories of direct evidentiality as well; how reliable is perception? I think the right move here is to assume something like Faller’s ‘best possible grounds’, by which we can evade the problem. Surely perceiving a horse(-like form) is the best possible grounds one could have for believing that there is a horse, regardless of whether or not there actually is one. One also wonders in this context about the evidential basis of Wittgensteinian hinge propositions (Wittgenstein 1991), and what evidentials are used with them. I do not have data that speaks to this issue.
- 16.
Is it actually reasonable at all? That is a different question entirely. The fact that shift is not obligatory in questions, only preferred, begins to make it appear that it might not be desirable, given that one must assume something like optional application of some monstrous operator to derive the facts. Better might be a fully pragmatic story: from aspects of the meaning of the ‘judge-sensitive’ expressions, derive a preferred interpretation on the basis of independently motivated rules or knowledge of the language and how it is typically used. See McCready (2012) for a framework that might be applicable in this context, given the right setup of lexical entries.
- 17.
Thanks to Jason Quinley (p.c) for this example.
- 18.
Or whatever the proper way is to characterize the relevant dependencies; see footnote 16.
- 19.
Officially, Stalnaker’s formulation uses pairs of centers and worlds, where centers are pairs of individuals and times. In this chapter, I am not concerned with temporally dependent propositions, so I will redact this aspect of the theory.
References
Asher, N., & McCready, E. (2007). Were, would, must and a compositional account of counterfactuals. Journal of Semantics, 24(2), 93–129.
Audi, R. (2002). The sources of knowledge. In The Oxford handbook of epistemology (pp. 71–95). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bach, K., & Harnish, R. (1979). Linguistic communication and speech acts. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bronnikov, G. (2011). Representation of Inference in the Natural Language. Ph.D. thesis, University of Texas at Austin.
Brown, J., & Herman, C. (Eds.). (2011). Assertion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chung, K.-S. (2005). Space in tense: The interaction of tense, aspect, evidentiality and speech act in Korean. Ph.D. thesis, Simon Fraser University.
Chung, K.-S. (2007). Spatial deictic tense and evidentials in Korean. Natural Language Semantics, 15, 187–219.
Davis, C., Christopher, P., & Peggy, S. (2007). The pragmatic values of evidential sentences. In M. Gibson & T. Friedman (Eds.), Proceedings of SALT 17. CLC Publications.
de Haan, F. (1999). Evidentiality and epistemic modality: Setting boundaries. Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 18, 83–101.
DeLancey, S. (1997). Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information. Linguistic Typology, 1, 33–52.
DeRose, K. (1992). Contextualism and knowledge attributions. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 52, 913–929.
DeRose, K., & Warfield, T. (Eds.). (1999). Skepticism: A contemporary reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Egan, A. (2006). Epistemic modals, relativism and assertion. Philosophical Studies, 133, 1–22.
Fagin, R., Halpern, J., Moses, Y., & Vardi, M. (1995). Reasoning about knowledge. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Faller, M. (2002). Semantics and pragmatics of evidentials in Cuzco Quechua. Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University.
Faller, M. (2004). The deictic core of ‘non-experienced past’ in Cuzco Quechua. Journal of Semantics, 21, 45–85.
Faller, M. (2007). The Cuzco Quechua reportative evidential and rhetorical relations. In A. Simpson & P. Austin (Eds.), Linguistische Berichte (Vol. Sonderhafte 14, pp. 223–252). Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag.
Fantl, J., & McGrath, M. (2009). Knowledge in an uncertain world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fodor, J. (1987). Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (2000). The mind doesn’t work that way. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Garrett, E. (2001). Evidentiality and assertion in Tibetan. Ph.D. thesis, UCLA.
Gettier, E. (1963). Is justified true belief knowledge? Analysis, 23, 121–123.
Hajek, A., & Eriksson, L. (2007). What are degrees of belief? Studia Logica, 86, 185–215.
Halpern, J. Y. (2003). Reasoning about uncertainty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hawthorne, J. (2004). Knowledge and lotteries. Oxford: Oxford university Press.
Kennedy, C. (2007). Vagueness and gradability: The semantics of relative and absolute gradable predicates. Linguistics and Philosophy, 30(1), 1–45.
Kratzer, A. (1981). The notional category of modality. In H.-J. Eikmeyer & H. Rieser (Eds.), Words, worlds, and contexts: new approaches in word semantics, no. 6 in Research in text theory (pp. 38–74). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Krifka, M. (1992). Thematic relations as links between nominal reference and event domains. In I. Sag & A. Szabolcsi (Eds.), Lexical matters (pp. 29–53). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Kruschke, J. (2010). Doing Bayesian data analysis. Manuscript, Indiana University.
Lasersohn, P. (2005). Context dependence, disagreement, and predicates of personal taste. Linguistics and Philosophy, 28, 643–686.
Lewis, D. (1979). Attitudes de dicto and de se. The Philosophical Review, 88, 513–543.
Lewis, D. (1980). A subjectivist’s guide to objective chance. In R. Jeffrey (Ed.), Studies in inductive logic and probability (Vol. 2). University of California Press. (Reprinted in Philosophical papers, Vol. 2 by L. Davis, Ed.).
Lewis, D. (1996). Elusive knowledge. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74, 549–567.
MacFarlane, J. (2011). Epistemic modals are assessment-sensitive. In B. Weatherson & A. Egan (Eds.), Epistemic modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Matthewson, L., Rullmann, H., & Davis, H. (2007). Evidentials as epistemic modals: Evidence from St’át’imcets. In J. van Craenenbroeck (Ed.), Linguistic variation yearbook 2007. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
McCready, E. (2007). Context shifting in questions and elsewhere. In E. Puig-Waldmüller (Ed.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 11 (pp. 433–447). Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
McCready, E. (2008). Evidentials, knowledge and belief. In Y. Nakayama (Ed.), Proceedings of LENLS 5.
McCready, E. (2010). Evidential universals. In T. Peterson & U. Sauerland (Eds.), Evidence from Evidentiality (Vol. 28, pp. 105–128) of UBC Working Papers in Linguistics. University of British Columbia.
McCready, E. (2011). Testimony, trust, and evidentials. To appear in Evidentials and Modals, C.-M. Lee & J. Park, (Eds.), CRiSPI, Brill Publications.
McCready, E. (2012). Emotive equilibria. Linguistics and Philosophy, 35, 243–283.
McCready, E., & Asher, N. (2006). Modal subordination in Japanese: Dynamics and evidentiality. In A. Eilam, T. Scheffler, & J. Tauberer (Eds.), Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 12.1 (pp. 237–249).
McCready, E., & Ogata, N. (2007). Evidentiality, modality, and probability. Linguistics and Philosophy, 30(2), 147–206.
Millar, A. (1991). Reasons and experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Murray, S. (2010). Evidentiality and the structure of speech acts. Ph.D. thesis, Rutgers.
Ogata, N. (2005). A multimodal dynamic predicate logic of Japanese evidentials. Paper presented at Language Under Uncertainty workshop: Kyoto University.
Perry, J. (1979). The problem of the essential indexical. Noûs, 13, 3–21.
Pollock, J., & Cruz, J. (1999). Contemporary theories of knowledge. Lanham: Rowman Littlefield.
Quine, W. V. O. (1960). Word and object. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Samuelson, P. (1938). A note on the pure theory of consumers’ behavior. Economica, 5(17), 61–71.
Sapir, E. (1922). The Takelma language of southwestern Oregon. In F. Boas (Ed.), Handbook of American Indian languages (Vol. 2, pp. 1–296). Washington: Government Printing Office.
Stalnaker, R. (2008). Our knowledge of the internal world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stanley, J. (2005). Knowledge and practical interests. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stephenson, T. (2007). Judge dependence, epistemic modals, and predicates of personal taste. Linguistics and Philosophy, 30(4), 487–525.
van Ditmarsch, H., van der Hoek, W., & Kooi, B. (2007). Dynamic epistemic logic. Berlin: Springer.
Veltman, F. (1996). Defaults in update semantics. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 25, 221–261.
von Fintel, K., & Gillies, T. (2008). CIA leaks. The Philosophical Review, 117, 77–98.
Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and its limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1991). On certainty. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Acknowledgments
I owe thanks to very many people over the course of this project. First is Norry Ogata, with whom I started working on this topic. It is too bad we could not have written this chapter together. I would also like to thank Chris Davis, David Etlin, Magda Kaufmann, Chris Kennedy, Linton Wang, the anonymous reviewers, and audiences at LENLS, GLOW, and the University of Chicago.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McCready, E. (2014). What is Evidence in Natural Language?. In: McCready, E., Yabushita, K., Yoshimoto, K. (eds) Formal Approaches to Semantics and Pragmatics. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 95. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8813-7_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8813-7_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-017-8812-0
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-8813-7
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)