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Knowledge, intuition and implicature

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Abstract

Moderate pragmatic invariantism (MPI) is a proposal to explain why our intuitions about the truth-value of knowledge claims vary with stakes and salient error-possibilities. The basic idea is that this variation is due to a variation not in the propositions expressed (as epistemic contextualists would have it) but in the propositions conversationally implicated. I will argue that MPI is mistaken: I will distinguish two kinds of implicature, namely, additive and substitutional implicatures. I will then argue, first, that the proponent of MPI cannot appeal to additive implicatures because they don’t affect truth-value intuitions in the required way. Second, I will argue that the proponent of MPI cannot appeal to substitutional implicatures either because, even though they may have the required effects on truth-value intuitions, they don’t feature in the relevant cases. It follows that MPI is mistaken because whether the proponent of MPI appeals to additive or substitutional implicatures, at least one of the claims that make up her view is false. Along the way, I will suggest principles about implicatures that should be relevant not only to MPI, but to pragmatic accounts of seemingly semantic intuitions in general.

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Notes

  1. There is a question of whether the indicated intuitions are driven by the heightened stakes in HIGH or the salient error-possibility (or both). See e.g. Nagel et al. (2013), Buckwalter (2014), Alexander et al. (2014) and Buckwalter and Schaffer (2015) for results suggesting that the salient alternative is one (if not the only) relevant factor. See e.g. Sripada and Stanley (2012), Pinillos (2012) and Pinillos and Simpson (2014) for stakes effects. See e.g. Hansen and Chemla (2013) for effects in cases where both parameters are changed at once. I will stay neutral on this issue. The subsequent considerations should apply independently of whether we focus on stakes or salience effects.

  2. Some experimental philosophers have argued that the indicated bank case intuitions don’t exist. See e.g. Feltz and Zarpentine (2010), May et al. (2010), Buckwalter (2010) and Turri (2016). I will leave this worry aside for the purposes of this paper. See the previous footnote for experimentalist responses. See also DeRose (2011). Note that the specific version of the bank cases from DeRose might not be ideally suited to elicit the intuitions in question. I use them just because they are most familiar. Readers are invited to substitute their favorite case pair.

  3. See e.g. Rysiew (2009) for an overview.

  4. MPI is defended in e.g. Rysiew (2001, 2005, 2007), Brown (2006), Black (2008a, b), Hazlett (2009), Lutz (2014) and Gerken (2015). I don’t think that the considerations presented in this paper apply to skeptical pragmatic invariantism as defended e.g. in Davis (2007) (at least not straightforwardly). But see Dinges (2016) for further discussion.

  5. See the previously indicated MPI literature for general characterizations of moderatism.

  6. See e.g. Montminy (2007) for further discussion of what invariantism amounts to.

  7. I assume familiarity with the notion of a conversational implicature in this paper. See Grice (1989) for basic reading. In principle, proponents of MPI could appeal to other pragmatic phenomena; for instance, conventional implicatures or presuppositions. As far as I can see, such views haven’t been defended. They are found wanting, however, in Leite (2005: Sec. 2.2.1), Fantl and McGrath (2007: 585ff) and Blome-Tillmann (2013b: Sec. 6). Another potential form of MPI that will not be the direct target of my discussion is the view proposed in Pritchard (2010). This view seeks to explain the contextual variation of knowledge claims not on the basis of implicatures, but on the basis of context-sensitive norms of assertion. Some of the subsequent objections may carry over to this version of MPI, but I will not explicitly address it here.

  8. I should note that some proponents of MPI reject the intuition that DeRose’s knowledge denial in HIGH sounds true. They would correspondingly reject a commitment to (I-Den) and (B-Den). See e.g. Hazlett (2009: p. 612), Pritchard (2010: p. 88f) and Lutz (2014: p. 1735f). It is not clear whether one can plausibly reject these intuitions in light of the previously indicated empirical findings (footnote 1). In any case, the commitment to (I-Asc) and (B-Asc) is problematic by itself, as I will subsequently show.

  9. The terminology “additive” and “substitutional” is taken from Meibauer (2009: p. 374), who, in passing, introduces a similar distinction. See also Dinges (2016) and Kindermann (2016).

  10. “Conveying something” is supposed to be equivalent at least roughly to something like “proposing it as something to be mutually believed.” Cp. Stalnaker (1978: p. 323).

  11. I should note that I’m not following Grice (1989: p. 87) in his assumption that everything that is said must also be meant. For Grice (1989: p. 34), cases of substitutional implicature would be cases where speakers only “make as if to say.”

  12. See also Rysiew (2001: p. 496, 2007: p. 648), Bach (2005: p. 62) and Brown (2006: p. 414).

  13. See also Blome-Tillmann (2013b: p. 4313n).

  14. See Larson et al. (2009a: Fig. 5.2).

  15. See e.g. Levinson (1983: p. 132ff) for a partly introductory discussion of the relevant scalar implicatures. Levinson (1983: p. 127) also holds that these implicatures “will be hard to distinguish from the semantic content of linguistic expressions, because such implicatures will be routinely associated with the relevant expression in all ordinary contexts.”

  16. See Fantl and McGrath (2009: p. 42).

  17. See Davis (2007: p. 430).

  18. Rysiew (2001: footnote 32) refers to Bach (1987: p. 78), where this example is used.

  19. See Larson et al. (2009b) for related results.

  20. See e.g. Kennedy (2013).

  21. See also Blome-Tillmann (2013b: p. 4313n).

  22. See e.g. Rysiew (2001) and Leite (2005: p. 110). See also the Levinson quote in footnote 15.

  23. See e.g. Brown (2006: Sec. 3.2). I’m assuming familiarity with the notion of an impliciture. See Bach (1994) for basic reading.

  24. See e.g. Stanley (2007) for extensive arguments to the effect that quantifier domain restriction (and many other similar alleged examples of impliciture) should be treated semantically.

  25. See Blome-Tillmann (2013b: Sec. 7) for some further discussion of the impliciture approach and an additional worry.

  26. See e.g. Davis (2010: p. 1154).

  27. See e.g. Hansen and Chemla (2013) and Buckwalter (2014).

  28. See Dinges (2016: Sec. 2) and Kindermann (2016: Sec. 3) for related considerations.

  29. Fantl and McGrath (2009: p. 41f) discuss the idea of a “white lie” as an exception to this principle, but also argue compellingly that white lies are implausible as a model for DeRose’s knowledge denial in HIGH.

  30. Petersen (2014: p. 43) seems to pursue a related strategy but his considerations require further elaboration. Even though the notion of calculability doesn’t feature prominently in this paper, I think my objection also bears similarities to the notorious calculability objection to MPI. See e.g. Dimmock and Huvenes (2014: Sec. 6) for a recent presentation.

  31. See e.g. Blome-Tillmann (2013a: p. 176) for a brief overview of the options.

  32. See e.g. Hugly and Sayward (1979: p. 23) and Neale (1992: p. 526) for this distinction. Grice (1989: pp. 33, 41) himself draws it on various occasions.

  33. See Neale (1992: p. 526).

  34. Similar distinctions have been adopted widely in the pragmatics literature. See e.g. Levinson (1983: p. 104) and Huang (2007: Sec. 2.1.3).

  35. Grice describes this category as involving cases “in which no maxim is violated.” My principle only requires that maxim observation is compatible with the common ground. This modification (or at least some such modification) is required to allow that lies (where the speaker violates \(\hbox {Quality}_{1}\) at the level of what is said) can feature observation implicatures. See Blome-Tillmann (2013a: footnote 17) for a similar appeal to the common ground. See Dinges (2015) for a defense of the idea that implicatures can arise in cases where maxim observation at the level of what is said is compatible with the common ground. The basic idea is that maxim observation at the level of what is said may still require certain beliefs on the part of the speaker, the content of which can end up as an implicature.

  36. Grice describes this category as involving cases “in which a maxim is violated, but its violation is to be explained by the supposition of a clash with another maxim.” Later, he suggests that, in these cases, the maxims are “so far as is possible observed” (Grice 1989: p. 41). I take this to be roughly equivalent to the above idea that the speaker tries to observe the maxims (or that this assumption is at least compatible with the common ground).

  37. These cases, according to Grice, involve the “flouting” of a maxim, that is, the speaker “blatantly fail[s] to fulfill [a maxim]” (ibid.: 30). A natural interpretation of this is that the speaker not only fails to observe the maxims, but doesn’t even try to do so and that this is not just a fact, but something that follows already from what is common ground (as suggested above). I plan to defend the foregoing interpretations of Grice in more detail in future work.

  38. See Stalnaker (2002) for further discussion.

  39. See Grice (1989: p. 32).

  40. On the account of relevance in Roberts (2012: p. 21), for instance, relevance is a matter of contextually entailing an answer to the question under discussion. See Smith and Wilson (1979: p. 176f), Leech (1983: p. 93f), Wilson and Sperber (1986: p. 54f) and Simons et al. (2010: footnote 3) for further explications of relevance underwriting the above, or at least closely related, contentions.

  41. See e.g. Korta and Perry (2012: Sec. 3.2.2) for a related distinction between “implicated premises” and “implicated conclusions.”

  42. Given the above considerations, the assumption that what is said is relevant will be relatively easy to square with the common ground in many cases. We just need to find a conditional connecting what is said to the issue at hand such that it is an open question for the hearer whether the speaker wants it in the common ground. This is in line with Grice ’s (1989: p. 35) observation that “[e]xamples in which an implicature is achieved by real, as distinct from apparent, violation of the maxim of Relation are perhaps rare,” and the corresponding observation in Levinson (1983: p. 111) that “[e]xploitations of [Relation] are, as Grice notes, a little harder to find, if only because it is hard to construct responses that must be interpreted as irrelevant.”

  43. See Grice (1989: p. 32).

  44. See (ibid.: 33ff) for a range of similar examples. See Levinson (1983: p. 110) for this specific example.

  45. See e.g. Carston (2016: p. 14) and Petersen (2014: p. 43).

  46. See e.g. Levinson (1983: pp. 104–112) for further pertinent examples.

  47. This is confirmed in Hansen and Chemla (2013: p. 299). The bank case scenario they use is one where the relevant subject keeps her evidence to herself. In the “Truck” case (2013: 315), it is also at least unclear whether the available evidence is known to the hearer.

  48. See also Rysiew (2007: p. 638f), Brown (2006: pp. 424–426), Hazlett (2009: p. 606) and Black (2008a: p. 196, pp. 199–200).

  49. See also Dimmock and Huvenes (2014: p. 3263 and esp. 3263n).

  50. See Blome-Tillmann (2013b: p. 4310n) for this suggestion.

  51. Stanley says that immediately after presenting the case. DeRose (2009: p. 4f) considers a different third-person case but equally claims that the knowledge denial will seem “true.” See also Fantl and McGrath (2009: p. 52). In general, there seems to be an almost universal consensus among philosophers that intuitions about third-person cases do not relevantly differ from intuitions about first-person cases. Unfortunately, Feltz and Zarpentine (2010) are the only ones to have directly tested third-person case intuitions in an experimental setup. They didn’t find relevant effects, but their studies were presumably problematic. They didn’t find relevant effects for first-person cases either, which were later confirmed in many studies (see footnote 1).

  52. See e.g. Brown (2006: p. 422) and Rysiew (2007: p. 637f).

  53. There are, unfortunately, no empirical data available on the resulting cases. But given that shared knowledge of the available evidence turned out to be irrelevant in first-person cases, it would at least be surprising if it made a difference in third-person cases.

  54. See also Dimmock and Huvenes (2014: p. 3265).

  55. See Blome-Tillmann (2013b: p. 4309) for a suggestion along these lines.

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Acknowledgements

I’m grateful to Ralf Busse, Christian Nimtz, Dan López de Sa, Emanuel Viebahn, Julia Zakkou, the reading group Sprachphilosophie Berlin (SPB), members of research colloquia in Berlin and Hamburg and two anonymous referees for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

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Dinges, A. Knowledge, intuition and implicature. Synthese 195, 2821–2843 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1359-2

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