Abstract
A recent focus on philosophical methodology has reinvigorated ordinary language philosophy with the contention that philosophical inquiry is better served by attending to the ordinary use of language. Taking cues from findings in the social sciences that deploy methods utilizing language, various ordinary language philosophers embrace a guiding mandate: that ordinary language usage is more reflective of our linguistic and conceptual competencies than standard philosophical methods. We analyze two hypotheses that are implicit in the research from which ordinary language approaches take their cues. This pair of optimistic assumptions (a) bind word meanings to properties of their corresponding concepts and (b) regard language as a direct reflection of our underlying cognitive processes and competencies. Polysemy and pragmatics complicate each assumption. Because the ordinary language philosopher’s methodological mandate compels us to consider how individuals process the utterances they encounter in deciphering the communicative intentions of speakers, failing to attend to the import of polysemy and pragmatics in philosophical and empirical methods has the potential to frustrate the aims of their insightful mandate. The significance of those two complications is worked out with the case study of knowledge.
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Notes
For the sake of clarity we adopt the following orthographic convention in what follows: when discussing linguistic expressions we mark them with italics (e.g., know); when discussing concepts we use the small-caps (e.g., know); when talking about worldly objects we leave the relevant expressions unmodified.
A recent Knowledge First approach in epistemology argues that knowledge is a purely mental state, in contrast to the orthodox analysis of knowledge as belief-states that meet some further, often mind-external condition. Our talk of “knowing as a mental state” does not to prejudge such debates, but simply indicates the object that those concerned with cognitive ontology are investigating, irrespective of how that thing, whatever it turns out to be, relates to words like know or concepts like know.
The primacy of intuitions as evidence in investigating knowledge is not universally taken as central, or even necessary (Kornblith, 2002; Maffie, 1990). Kornblith (2002) for example takes knowledge to be natural kind (ibid §2.7), which our intuitive judgments might reliably track, but no more requires the method of cases than other naturalistic investigation (ibid §1.3). See Goldman (2005) for discussion. Our thanks to an anonymous reviewer for drawing our attention to this point.
Gettier’s paper deploys the method of cases, but does so in a way that superficially deviates from our presentation here. After offering a vignette about Jones and Smith, Gettier simply states that Smith does not have knowledge: “Smith does not know that (e) is true” (Gettier, 1963, p. 122). However, the implication is clear, that Gettier’s reader would agree with him.
Debates in linguistics have called into question the reliability of trained linguists’ judgments, as compared to naive speakers (see Gibson and Fedorenko (2010, 2013) and responses from Culicover and Jackendoff (2010), Sprouse and Almeida (2013)). In the end, there is room for multiple methods to advance our knowledge. Evidence suggests that linguists’ acceptability judgments converge with naive speakers’ judgements more generally (Sprouse et al., 2013).
This is more commonly known as a “truth-value judgment task”. For reasons that will become clear in Sect. 3.3, describing the task in this way is misleading.
Related points are made within the epistemology literature, and more narrowly targeted at various Knowledge First proposals (Ichikawa & Jenkins, 2017). There they highlight the illicit inference that the truth of claims about how agents represent the minds of others entails the truth of claims about the nature of the mental states those represented minds are in.
For example, after reading a story about a woman buying a fake diamond (the “false beliefs case”) participants were asked: “In your view which of the following sentences better describes Emma’s situation?”:
-
(1)
Emma knows that the stone is a diamond.
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(2)
Emma feels like she knows that the stone is a diamond, but she doesn’t actually know that it is. (Machery et al., 2017, p. 649)
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(1)
Indeed, they say exactly this: “the ‘method of cases’ which uses intuitions about hypothetical cases as evidence in evaluating analysis of philosophically important concepts, like the concept of knowledge...” (Machery et al., 2017, p. 646).
For example, Turri (2013) illustrates that a structural repackaging of Gettier cases biases respondents’ judgments about cases of epistemic luck. In one study, two groups were asked to respond to the same Gettier cases, with Turri manipulating the temporal presentation of the text. For one group, the Gettier cases were presented in three distinct stages, dividing the text into parts corresponding to the structural features common to Gettier cases. A second group were presented the same vignettes in a single stage. The manipulation to the temporal presentation of vignettes had the effect of aligning participants’ judgments with the judgments of philosophers.
The epistemic contextualist denies that epistemic terms have context-invariant meanings. One such account treats words like know as indexicals like here. Just as the significance of a particular use of here will change depending on the location of its use, the significance of know varies from context to context (Cohen, 1988).
The experimental and natural solutions are not mutually exclusive—both modifications may be needed to respond to the productive limit problem. In fact, Hansen and Chemla (2013) seems to be an instance of exactly this, soliciting judgments from a multitude of participants about natural seeming cases where the stakes vary in natural seeming ways.
The findings here are a bit more nuanced. Four conditions were tested modulating both the significance and the difficulty of the perceptual judgment task, where a temporal constraint served as a proxy for difficulty. After all, making a perceptual judgment with less time is more difficult. The finding was that, the influence of raising the importance of the task only manifested in the less difficult condition, where participants had more time to make their judgment. Intuitively, participants were more swayed by peers if they either took the task to be unimportant, or if they took their judgment to be less reliable given the difficulty of the task. But the sway of their peers diminished if the task was both important and less difficult.
Glanzberg (2011) does not directly discuss know or its correlative concepts. But the view described therein takes “root” word meanings to contain extra-linguistic conceptual content that “packages” the resources of extra-linguistic cognition in ways that are (broadly) context sensitive. See also Glanzberg (2014, 2018).
Our thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this concern.
Others corroborate this sociological claim, that most philosophers are externalists about meaning and content (Gertler, 2012).
Phillips and colleagues use the term “factive”, a borrowing from linguistics which was originally coined to label a class of presupposition-triggering predicates, including know, inspired by the syntactic properties of those predicates (Kiparsky & Kiparsky, 1970). Given that factivity has a different meaning in the linguistic literature (see Sect. 5) we prefer to use the term “veridical” to avoid confusion.
Consider your own response to the question Does Anne gorp what is in the box? and what that response has to do with your ability to attribute knowledge to others. This kind of context has been used to simulate how adults with full mindreading competence will respond to different kinds of linguistic stimuli (Gillette et al., 1999).
Our thanks to an anonymous reviewer for drawing our attention to this distinction.
By definition, this kind of task requires the participant to accommodate the presupposition triggered by know. With a well-designed study, this has the desirable consequence that the bar for success is quite high: participants succeed if and only if they both understand what is presupposed and are able to accommodate it online. There may be many reasons why children (and even adults) might fail to accommodate.
Of course a method based on presupposition projection can only rule out the possibility that children have a factive representation for think. However it is still an open question whether children ever entertain a non-factive but veridical representation. This would be inconsistent with the generalization that all doxastic factives are also veridicals (Anand & Hacquard, 2014) and would require demonstrating that there is evidence available to the learner allowing them to un-learn the veridicality of think.
A relation between the two is also consistent with a causal role in the opposite direction to the one we seek. For example, children may get more of the hypothesized critical input because their understanding was already more mature than their peers and thus they lead adults into more complex conversations than their peers. Ultimately, experimental methods like training studies are needed to test causal hypotheses.
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For helpful comments on versions of this paper we thank three anonymous reviewers at this journal, as well as the participants at the conference ‘Philosophy’s Experimental Turn and the Challenge from Ordinary Language’ (Berlin, June 2022). Special thanks is also owed to Eugen Fischer and Nat Hansen for their insightful input at various stages of this project. This project is funded with support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme via a Widening Fellowship #101038068 (ISLI).
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Dudley, R., Vogel, C. Knowledge, the concept know, and the word know: considerations from polysemy and pragmatics. Synthese 203, 17 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04439-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04439-1