Abstract
Positions in the debate about the correct semantics of “S knows that p” are sometimes motivated in part by an appeal to interpretive charity. In particular, non-skeptical views hold that many utterances of the sentence “S knows that p” are true and some of them think the fact that their views are able to respect this is a reason why their views are more charitable than skeptical invariantism. However, little attention has been paid to why charity should be understood in this way and little effort has been spent justifying the notion that a charitable semantics is likely to be true. I distinguish two kinds of interpretive charity. One principle of charity is often appealed to in the literature. I introduce a second. I argue that while some positions better respect one principle of charity, the reverse is true of the other principle of charity. I conclude with some remarks about how to break this apparent tie.
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Notes
In this way of describing the view, what makes moderate invariantism “moderate” is not its epistemic standards, but its result—lots of true knowledge attributions. (Hawthorne (2004) characterizes the position this way.) It is consistent with a view being “moderate” invariantist that it accepts very high standards for knowledge, provided that the standards are met regularly.
DeRose includes, as a condition on a principle of charity, the knowledge attributions whose truth is to be assumed not be based on false beliefs about “underlying matters of fact.” While some sort of qualification like this is indeed necessary, it is tricky to figure out how to state the qualification. However it is put, the principle should be understood as not granting the truth of knowledge attributions which are based on inference from a false premise (as in the stopped clock “Gettier” case), but how to precisely state the qualification while avoiding triviality remains a challenge: one false belief that a subject has might be that I (the subject) know the proposition, but surely the DeRose qualification should not say, “presume knowledge attributions are true, except when the subject believes he knows that p but his belief is false because he doesn’t know that p.”
Note that DeRose and Williamson identify charity with interpreting speakers as speaking truly, while Brown and Montminy identify charity with regarding as true speakers’ intuitions about the truth - values of knowledge attributions. Although they present the assumption of charity slightly differently, all four are pointing to the same principle. The familiar thought experiments in this debate feature both knowledge attributors and subjects of knowledge attributions—sometimes, as in the Bank Case, an individual is both attributor and subject. The truth - maximization principle of charity is assumed whether what we are asked to regard as true is what the attributor says (or thinks)—“I know that the bank will be open”—or the intuition that it is true that the attributor spoke (or thought) truly when he said “I know that the bank will be open.” Stating the principle in terms of intuitions about cases is, I think, simply a less direct way of putting it. I thank an anonymous referee for prompting me to clarify how these quotations assume a single principle of charity.
This way of presenting the problem is due to Cohen (2005). I have added quotation marks to make it clear that the intuitive truth values of sentences are what generate the paradox, since by Cohen’s own account, there is no conflict at the level of propositions.
Rysiew basically accepts the conclusion that knowledge deniers in the sort of situation described above are confused (2001). The explanation of why they are confused is the focus of Rysiew’s influential paper.
Another option is to have the number expressed by ‘a million’ vary in accordance with the strictness of standards in a context of number-attribution, but it should be clear that this is just as problematic as the idea stated above.
This should not be taken to imply that ordinary speakers can explain the difference between semantic and pragmatic content of utterances, just that they are sensitive to the difference.
I have received the objection that semantic externalism is incompatible with the presumption of linguistic sensitivity. That is what motivates my use of Putnam here. Putnam defended the externalist thesis “meaning is reference” and still required semantic competence in the form of what I am calling linguistic sensitivity. It is hard to imagine how communication would be possible if speakers were not sensitive to the correct behavior of terms familiar to them in the way described here.
As a general thesis, Putnam’s condition is not necessary for semantic competence. It is possible for a person to be perfectly competent with a language but have bizarre beliefs about the world that are widely rejected by the speaker’s linguistic community. Some people think Elvis is still alive. They are semantically competent with all of the words used to express that belief even though their language community widely rejects “Elvis is alive.” Thanks to Richard Fumerton for discussion on this point.
Semantically irrelevant, that is. It is a contingent fact that tigers live where there are ants. If this were not so, then “There are ants!” could be taken to challenge “That’s a tiger.” However, that possible world is not ours.
I have tried to state this in a way that is not overly cognitive. One need not presuppose that speakers have dispositional beliefs about definitions to accept this account. It is consistent with this account that one’s understanding of a term amounts to no more than dispositions to say certain things in response to various stimuli (prior thoughts, others’ remarks, etc.).
It is a stretch to say that having a dispositional property is sufficient to make true subjunctive conditionals describing the behavior of some entity. A background condition could always fail to cooperate with the disposition. In that case, the entity would possess the dispositional property but that fact would fail to make true the subjunctive conditional(s) in question. I want to set that issue aside here. For discussion, see Chisholm (1955) and Lewis (1997). I am committed, though, to the idea that some analysis of these subjunctives in terms of dispositions is part of the correct analysis.
The issue of “semantic blindness” seems to me to cover a host of issues about which, if contextualism is true, speakers are severely mistaken. Too often, the different forms of ignorance required by contextualism are not kept apart, which might have something to do with why some philosophers think semantic blindness is so damning to contextualism (e.g., Schiffer 1996) and some think it is not problematic at all (DeRose 2006). I am trying to be more precise in this paper, which is why I am limiting the discussion above to a technical notion of linguistic sensitivity. Abath (2012) has argued that whether or not semantic blindness is a problem for contextualism, what Abath calls “content unawareness” is. In short, if contextualism is true, people do not know what contents their sentences convey. On my way of categorizing things, his content unawareness is a kind of semantic blindness.
DeRose (2006) offers many arguments for the acceptability of contextualism in the light of Schiffer’s (1996), Hawthorne’s (2004), and Stanley’s (2005) objections. Responding to them all is outside the scope of this paper. However, I will address the main theme of his paper: his argument seems to be that because “well-constructed” cases often elicit the intuition that speakers are not contradicting each other when they utter surface-contradictory knowledge attributions suggests that contextualism does not uniquely have a problem of semantic blindness. That may be, but it leaves untouched that other explanations of the intuition are possible and that contextualism is far less intuitively acceptable to most people than an contextualist interpretation of less controversially context-sensitive terms like “flat”, as Cohen (2004) has noted.
I say more about this conception of analysis and use it to defend another sort of skeptical view in (Stoutenburg 2015).
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Acknowledgements
I thank Richard Fumerton, Landon Elkind, and Ryan Cobb for reading and commenting on an earlier draft. Thanks are also due to audiences at a University of Iowa Graduate Salon and the University of Iowa Graduate Philosophical Society Fall 2014 Conference, where earlier versions of this paper were presented. Bryan Appley, Landon Elkind, Phil Ricks, Brady Hoback, Emily Waddle, Gregory Landini, David Cunning, and Evan Fales gave especially helpful feedback at those events.
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Endnotes
I thank Richard Fumerton, Landon Elkind, and Ryan Cobb for reading and commenting on an earlier draft. Thanks are also due to audiences at a University of Iowa Graduate Salon and the University of Iowa Graduate Philosophical Society Fall 2014 Conference, where earlier versions of this paper were presented. Bryan Appley, Landon Elkind, Phil Ricks, Brady Hoback, Emily Waddle, Gregory Landini, David Cunning, and Evan Fales gave especially helpful feedback at those events.
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Stoutenburg, G. Principles of Interpretive Charity and the Semantics of Knowledge Attributions. Acta Anal 31, 153–168 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-015-0267-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-015-0267-7