Abstract
Hope, in its propositional construction “I hope that p” is compatible with a stated chance for the speaker that \(\lnot \textit{p}\). On fallibilist construals of knowledge, knowledge is compatible with a chance of being wrong, such that one can know that p even though there is an epistemic chance for one that \(\lnot \textit{p}\). But self-ascriptions of propositional hope that p seem to be incompatible, in some sense, with self-ascriptions of knowing whether p. Data from conjoining hope self-ascription with outright assertions, with first- and third-person knowledge ascriptions, and with factive predicates suggest a problem: when combined with a plausible principle on the rationality of hope, they suggest that fallibilism is false. By contrast, the infallibilist about knowledge can straightforwardly explain why knowledge would be incompatible with hope, and can offer a simple and unified explanation of all the linguistic data introduced here. This suggests that fallibilists bear an explanatory burden which has been hitherto overlooked.
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Notes
There are many ways of spelling out the fallibilist doctrine. My purpose is not to adjudicate them here, but to begin with a general statement of the view. See Reed (2002) and Dougherty (2011) for discussions of fallibilism, and Brown (2011) and Dutant (2016) for different ways of characterizing infalliblism.
Downie: “one cannot hope that something will occur if one already knows that it will; knowledge overshoots the criterion of probability” (Downie 1963, p. 249). Day: “one cannot, logically, want, and so hope for, what he already knows that he has...[nor] hope for, what he...knows he cannot have” (1969, p. 95). Gordon: “a person hopes that p only if he does not know that p” (1969, 1987, p. 26). And Martin: “hope entails uncertainty...e.g. lack of knowledge” (2011, p. 154).
Cf. Dorr and Hawthorne (2013, p. 910) for related points.
This is Geach’s well-known “Frege point”: see Geach (1965).
See Williamson (2000, ch. 11), Hawthorne (2004, 23ff.), Turri (2011, 2014, 2016), and Benton (2011, 2016), among many others. Rival norms of assertion are offered by Weiner (2005), Douven (2006), Lackey (2007), McKinnon (2013) and Gerken (2017), among others. But it is unclear to me how those rival norms would explain the infelicity of (2); indeed, one might expect that such norms requiring merely warrant or rational credibility or supportive reasons in order to assert would sanction assertions like (2).
CLH might have counterexamples: e.g., one all things considered desires that p, but only because one is irrationally responding to one’s evidence which indicates that if p then terrible outcomes ensue which one, all things considered, desires not to obtain. In such a case, it seems highly irrational to hope that p. But such counterexamples are irrelevant to this argument against fallibilism. Thanks to Blake Roeber here.
It has been suggested to me that fallibilists might explain the hope-knows incompatibility by appeal to reasoning like the following:
(1) Knowing that p requires being completely confident (or having confidence of at least E*) that p.
(2) Hoping that p requires not being completely confident (or not having E* or higher) that p.
(3) Therefore, knowing that p is incompatible with hoping that p.
And plugging in \(\lnot \textit{p}\) to (2) for p will generate the conclusion that knowing that p is incompatible with hoping that \(\lnot \textit{p}\), on the plausible assumption that one will have far less than complete (or E*) confidence in \(\lnot \textit{p}\) when one knows p. However, this approach seems unpromising: fallibilists will not endorse the first premise above on the “complete confidence” interpretation, because they do not require maximally strong confidence or evidence in order to know. So the “at least E*” gloss is required for premise (1); and if so, then the E* gloss is also required for (2). But then (2) seems less plausible, for just as the lottery examples considered earlier suggest that there is no minimum confidence level required for hoping that p, there also does not seem to be a maximum confidence level (short of complete confidence) required for hope: one might well hope that one loses the lottery. (And this strategy is complicated by some fallibilists who think one can know that a lottery ticket will lose; see discussion of Reed in Sect. 3.) At any rate, a fallibilist who would like to pursue this line would need to specify in more concrete terms exactly what E* is, how it is set, whether it is context-sensitive, and so on. What is more, it is unclear how the above reasoning would account for third-party knowledge ascriptions like (12).
Note that (12) is semantically consistent, as it embeds under “if” or “suppose”.
Stanley (2005) is an exception, for he claims that such conjunctions are semantically inconsistent; thus his non-standard version of fallibilism predicts the data from (14), as well as its inability to embed in (15)–(16), considered below. Because of this, however, his fallibilism is disputed as not really being fallibilist at all (e.g. Reed 2013, p. 53).
E.g. Anand and Hacquard (2013), pp. 27–29.
I am assuming that most (perhaps all) of the infelicitous conjunctions considered in this paper remain so when commuted.
Note that Anderson’s gloss on fallibilism might be attractive to many who find other construals of fallibilism problematic: “Fallibilists are committed to the idea that for many propositions we know, there is some body of propositions, K-p , such that we can know p on the basis of K-p even though ‘might \(\lnot \textit{p}\)’ is true relative to K-p (2014, p. 604).” This seems fine insofar as inductive knowledge and knowledge from testimony satisfy it; it simply encodes the idea that not all of our knowledge is gained by deductive or entailment relations. But if this is all that fallibilists are committed to, it will not clearly predict that knowledge itself is compatible with an epistemic chance of being wrong (e.g. a Williamsonian E=K theorist may well agree with Anderson’s gloss, but deny that when they know p, that knowledge that p is compatible with their own affirmation that ‘might \(\lnot \textit{p}\)’).
However, linguists differ on whether, or how much, ambiguity differs from polysemy. See Sennet (2016), §1 for discussion and citations.
Thanks to Peter van Elswyk here.
See Unger (1975, pp. 151–152, 171ff.), Gordon (1969, 1987), and Dietz (2017) for the entailment view. Comesaña and McGrath (2014) and Fantl (2015) argue that some factives do not require knowledge. But notice that their views appear to acquire the burden of explaining the infelicity of conjunctions like (20)–(25) below.
If one argues instead that constructions with factive emotive predicates do not even implicate knowledge, another puzzle is raised, namely, discerning what would wrong with them when they sound bizarre, and why it seems they all suffer from what is plausibly the same structural malady.
Might the infallibilist do better to rest their case only on the idea that knowledge and hope are rationally inconsistent, while remaining neutral on whether their self-ascriptions can be semantically consistent? Perhaps, but doing so would mean that they do not have as many resources to predict the infelicitous embeddings considered throughout this paper.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments, many thanks especially to John Hawthorne, Billy Dunaway, Dylan Dodd, and Blake Roeber, as well as Bob Beddor, Fabrizio Cariani, Andrew Chignell, Christina Dietz, Anne Jeffrey, Adrienne Martin, Sam Newlands, Baron Reed, Rebekah Rice, Paolo Santorio, John Turri, Peter van Elswyk, and to two helpful anonymous referees. Thanks also to audiences at Northwestern University and the University of Nottingham. This paper was supported in part by a Faculty Research and Scholarship grant (Seattle Pacific University, 2017), and by grants from the John Templeton Foundation (at the University of Oxford, and especially at the University of Notre Dame through the Hope and Optimism: Conceptual and Empirical Investigations project). The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Benton, M.A. Knowledge, hope, and fallibilism. Synthese 198 (Suppl 7), 1673–1689 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1794-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1794-8