Abstract
Relativism about knowledge attributions is the view that a single occurrence of ‘S knows [does not know] that p’ may be true as assessed in one context and false as assessed in another context. It has been argued that relativism is equipped to accommodate all the data from speakers’ use of ‘know’ without recourse to an error theory. This is supposed to be relativism’s main advantage over contextualist and invariantist views. This paper argues that relativism does require the attribution of semantic blindness to speakers, viz. to account for sceptical paradoxes and epistemic closure puzzles. To that end, the notion of semantic blindness is clarified by distinguishing between content-blindness and index-blindness, and it is argued that the attribution of index-blindness required by the relativist account is implausible. Along the way, it is shown that error-theoretic objections from speakers’ inter-contextual judgments fail against relativism.
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Notes
In this paper, I will not be concerned with MacFarlane’s arguments against traditional and subject-sensitive versions of invariantism that complete his case for relativism. The presentation of his argument against contextualism is intended to exemplify his argument-by-elimination strategy and to introduce the semantic framework.
This characterisation is simplified in two respects. First, epistemic standards—the strength of epistemic position one must be in to count as knowing—come in degrees. There are more different standards and corresponding contexts than High and Low. Second, the propositional form S knows relative to high/low standards that p is supposed to be neutral between different contextualist proposals for the structure of the propositions expressed.
See MacFarlane (2005a) and Williamson (2005). Further objections to epistemic contextualist semantics concern, e.g., disagreement judgments (MacFarlane 2007), belief reports (Cappelen and Lepore 2005; Hawthorne 2004), the analogy between ‘know’ and gradable adjectives (Stanley 2005), the analogy with indexicals and with quantificational determiners like ‘all’ and ‘every’ (Schaffer and Szabó, forthcoming).
For the above notion of indexicality and a different notion of context-sensitivity, see MacFarlane (2009).
On the above notion of context-sensitivity, contingent sentences and tensed sentences count as context-sensitive. This broad notion of context-sensitivity is useful as an umbrella term for specific kinds of context-sensitivity, among which is the sensitivity to the epistemic standards salient at a context.
Akerman and Greenough (2010) propose an alternative way of distinguishing between kinds of context-sensitivity and corresponding kinds of blindness. They provide a helpful discussion and comparison of these kinds of blindness for the case of vague expressions.
In this paper, I will focus on MacFarlane’s version of relativism. Similar relativist semantics for knowledge attributions have been proposed by Richard (2004, 2008) and Kölbel (2009). All of the arguments in favour and against relativism discussed in this paper apply, mutatis mutandis, to all of these versions.
I will here ignore the differences between Lewisian index and Kaplanian circumstance of evaluation. They have no bearing on any of the arguments discussed in this paper. I will henceforth use the shorter ‘index’.
Contextualism can also be situated in this picture of semantics: It locates the relevant epistemic standards in the context of use that combines with a sentence to deliver a content; contents then are evaluated at an index, which does not include a standards coordinate.
Egan et al. (2005) treat the binary predicate ‘true relative to context C’ as applying to utterances. MacFarlane prefers the metalinguistic predicate ‘true at C U and C A ’ used in the formulation of the relativist semantics, which relates either sentences or propositions with contexts of use and contexts of assessment. Whatever the exact details, the common denominator here is the explicit relativization of truth to a context in which the truth bearer is evaluated. I will use ‘true relative to context C’ as a predicate that applies to truth bearers, be they utterances, sentences(-in-context), or propositions.
Montminy (2009) does not claim that this first objection goes through against the relativist, for roughly the reasons I give at the beginning of the next section. He does hold, however, that another variant of the strategy is successful, one on which the claims involving the explicitly relativized truth predicate are replaced by supposedly extensionally equivalent counterfactual conditionals. I argue in the next section that that objection does not succeed against the relativist either.
Results from Google searches should not serve as conclusive evidence, but the fact that a Google search for ‘true relative to this context’ (in July 2011) resulted in only four hits—three papers in philosophy (including Montminy 2009) and one in linguistics—strongly suggests that English speakers are not well-acquainted with the expression. ‘True relative to context’ offered 29 hits, all of which were philosophy or linguistics papers. A feeling of oddity was also the reaction of most philosophers and non-philosophers when I presented them with dialogue (2).
Montminy argues that even this connection between the notion of truth at C U and C A and language use requires the attribution of systematic error to speakers. As he points out, the commitment to withdrawing an assertion in any future context of assessment in which what is asserted is shown to be untrue relative to that context of assessment entails (*):
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(*)
In asserting ‘S knows that P’ (‘S does not know that Q’), one commits oneself to withdrawing the assertion in any future context C A(High) (C A(Low)) in which what is asserted by ‘S knows that P’ (‘S does not know that Q’) is shown to be untrue relative to C A(High) (C A(Low)).
Montminy grants for the sake of argument that speakers do in fact withdraw their assertions of ‘S knows that P’ (‘S does not know that Q’) made in Low (High) when challenged in High (Low). But he denies that speakers ‘take themselves to be bound by [(*)]’: ‘the fact that a speaker in Low would withdraw her previous knowledge denial made in High does not entail that when she is in High, the speaker takes herself to be committed to withdrawing her current knowledge denial, if this denial is challenged in some future Low. As a matter of fact, a speaker in High would reject this commitment, that is, such a speaker would hold that it would be incorrect to withdraw her current knowledge denial in some future low-standards context’ (Montminy 2009, p. 354). Montminy concludes that relativism implies that speakers are systematically mistaken about their commitments to withdraw knowledge claims.
Relativists can resist this argument in several ways. First, it is not clear that speakers would in fact reject the commitment to withdraw knowledge attributions (denials) once the standards have risen (fallen). What could the evidence be for speakers’ rejection of the commitment if it is not their linguistic behaviour (which, Montminy grants, honours this commitment)? Presumably Montminy has in mind speakers’ explicit judgments about what they take their commitments to be (what they ‘hold’). Pending empirical evidence, relativists may simply doubt that speakers would make judgments that stand in contrast to their actual behaviour—after all, they do seem to withdraw. (It has been widely noted that raising standards is easier than lowering them, which might in part explain why speakers are more reluctant to explicitly withdraw knowledge denials (because they do not accept switching to Low). But this does not threaten MacFarlane’s claim about the commitment to withdraw, which only says that when speakers are in Low, they will withdraw a knowledge denial that is untrue relative to Low.)
Second, relativists may even grant that speakers do make judgments to the effect that it is incorrect to withdraw a knowledge attribution in High, but deny that speakers’ explicit judgments are relevant for an account that links the concept of relative truth to speakers’ language use. By analogy, syntacticians would have to predict widespread error if part of their evidence was speakers’ acceptance or rejection of explicitly stated grammatical rules which speakers, as a matter of fact, employ in their use of language.
Finally, it is worth pointing out that MacFarlane’s 2005 commitment account of assertion is by far not the only way of linking the concept of relative truth to language use. MacFarlane (2010) argues that many of the common accounts of assertion corroborate the concept of relative truth as the link between the compositional semantics and language use as long as a corresponding norm of retraction is added. And Egan et al. (2005), Egan (2007), and Stephenson (2007) offer alternative accounts of assertion for relativists.
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(*)
Moruzzi and Wright promote a similar idea of trumping for relativism about future contingents. Overriding contrasts with trumping in one crucial respect: ‘Being trumped […] involves that another perspective gets, not to override the mandates of one’s own perspective, but to determine what they are’ (Moruzzi and Wright 2009, p. 314 n.10).
Overriding does not affect the predictions about intra-contextual and inter-contextual truth ascriptions. It also leaves the data from ordinary disquotational ‘true’ untouched, since it exclusively targets the explicitly relativized, technical truth predicate. Finally, retracting an earlier knowledge claim because it is false at the current context of assessment is compatible with the additional judgment that the knowledge claim also turns out to be false at the previous context of assessment.
Given first-order relativism and overriding, it follows that there is a first-order relativized truth ascription ‘It is true (false) relative to C A1’, which is true relative to a context of assessment C A2 and false relative to C A3. A further question is whether first- and second-order relativism can coherently be combined with third-order absolutism, or whether higher-order relativism is required all the way up. It is beyond the scope of this paper to determine whether higher-order relativism of any sort would be a price worth paying for accommodating data from inter-contextual truth ascriptions.
Cf. MacFarlane’s definition of logical consequence (MacFarlane 2011a, p. 167)
Note that to get necessary and sufficient conditions for the validity of (SA), it must be the case that, necessarily, for every C U and C A , if the premises are true at C U and C A , then the conclusion is true at C U and C A . It is easy to see that for any C A with sufficiently high standards to make the premises of (SA) true, the conclusion will also be true.
For simplicity, I assume that all contexts C A(High) and all contexts C A(Low) together exhaust all possible contexts of assessment.
I have chosen a phenomenology of sceptical arguments according to which, as we reason from premises to conclusion, we go from corresponding truth judgments to a falsity judgment. Accordingly, the relativist solution diagnoses a switch of contexts of assessment in the move from premises to conclusion. Nothing hangs on this choice. One might prefer to say that in reasoning through (SA), we come to accept the sceptical conclusion and only then remember our usual acceptance of the unnegated conclusion in everyday contexts. These two judgments then strike us as inconsistent, creating the air of paradox. If we prefer this diagnosis, what needs explanation in terms of index-blindness is the mistaken feeling of inconsistency between one’s truth judgment of the conclusion in the high-standards context of assessment of (SA) and one’s falsity judgments of ‘I don’t know that I have hands’ in everyday low-standards context of assessment.
Note that the relativist ‘solution’ to sceptical paradox, like the contextualist’s, does not amount to a refutation of scepticism. On the contrary, the relativist account gives sceptical intuitions their due. This does not imply that we can never (in no context of assessment) truly attribute knowledge. Whether or not sceptical standards are reasonable ones to adopt is a question on which the relativist semantics is neutral.
Relativists need a local index-blindness thesis. That is, speakers are imputed with index-blindness only locally, namely regarding sceptical arguments, situations in which they are confronted with the three knowledge sentences from (SA), and epistemic closure puzzles, as I argue below. Local index-blindness must be distinguished from global index-blindness, according to which speakers are blind to the index-sensitivity of an expression (knowledge sentences) in any situation in which the expression is used or evaluated. The latter is not needed to explain sceptical paradox, and its attribution would undermine other data in favour of a relativist semantics. Note that the distinction between local and global blindness is orthogonal to the distinction between content-blindness and index-blindness. The extent to which a semantic theory needs a local content-blindness thesis is determined by the range of data that this thesis needs to explain.
A similar case could be constructed for ‘orthodox’ semantics, on which sentences vary in truth value only with a worlds coordinate in the index.
The objection in this section applies to nonindexical contextualist solutions of the paradox as well. Nonindexical contextualism (Brogaard 2008; Kompa 2002; MacFarlane 2009) shares with relativism the theses of invariant content and index-sensitivity (cf. theses 1 and 2 in Sect. 2) but assumes that the epistemic standards coordinate in the index is determined by the context of use. But the kind of use-index-blindness required for nonindexical contextualist solutions is by no means more plausible than the one relativists are committed to.
For illustration, consider a plausible case of a context-confused but index-competent speaker. Suppose that on a rainy St. Andrew's Day, John falls into a coma, from which he awakens three weeks later on a sunny day without any memory of having been in a coma, nor any awareness of time having passed since St. Andrew’s Day. Suppose John then incorrectly judges ‘It’s raining’ to be true. Given a temporalist semantics, his judging so can be explained by the fact that John is mistaken about the time of his context of use. Unaware of time’s passing, he assumes it is still St. Andrew’s Day, when it was raining. The explanation of John’s mistake in judging need not declare him blind to the time-parameter of the index (given a temporalist semantics). All John suffers from is mislocation in time. He is ignorant of his actual context, yet he is fully index-competent.
Perhaps with one exception: Mark Richard seems to advertise relativism as a plausible development, or fix of, epistemic contextualism and recommends the ‘insight into what is going on in skeptical arguments’ offered by contextualism as one of the view’s attractions (2008, p. 167). Presumably, then, Richard would not be tempted to reject the relativist treatment of sceptical paradoxes in Sect. 5 above.
A simple version of single-premise epistemic closure principle is (EC) (cf. Hawthorne 2004, pp. 31–50) for a discussion and refinement of the principle):
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(EC)
Necessarily, if S knows p and S knows that p entails q, then S knows q.
Note that we can formulate the sceptical argument by explicitly using a contraposition instance of (EC) and the plausible assumption that one knows that one’s having hands entails that one is not a BIV: (1) I don’t know that I’m not a BIV. (2) Necessarily, if I don’t know that I’m not a BIV, then either I don’t know that I have hands or I don’t know that my having hands entails that I’m not a BIV. (3) I know that my having hands entails that I’m not a BIV. (4) Therefore, I don’t know that I have hands.
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(EC)
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Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were presented in Edinburgh, Miami, St Andrews, at the Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference 2010 in Sydney, and at the conference ‘Contexts, Perspectives and Relative Truth’ in Bonn. I am greatly indebted to the audiences at all these occasions. Thanks to Derek Ball, Jochen Briesen, Jessica Brown, Herman Cappelen, Stewart Cohen, Torfinn Huvenes, Jonathan Ichikawa, Martin Montminy, Dilip Ninan, Jonathan Schaffer, Daniele Sgaravatti, Brian Weatherson, and all the members of Arché’s Contextualism & Relativism Project for their helpful comments and discussion. I am particularly grateful to Patrick Greenough and Jonathan Schaffer for their continuing support and their invaluable feedback on various drafts. In preparing this work, I have benefitted from support by the AHRC, the University of St Andrews, and the DAAD.
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Kindermann, D. Relativism, sceptical paradox, and semantic blindness. Philos Stud 162, 585–603 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9783-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9783-5