Abstract
What accounts for the capacity of ordinary speakers to comprehend utterances of their language? The phenomenology of hearing speech in one’s own language makes it tempting to many epistemologists to look to perception for an answer to this question. That is, just as a visual experience as of a red square is often taken to give the perceiver immediate justification for believing that there is a red square in front of her, perhaps an auditory experience as of the speaker asserting that p gives the competent hearer immediate justification for believing that the speaker has asserted that p. My aim here is to offer reasons for resisting this temptation. I argue that the perceptual model cannot adequately account for the hearer’s justification in many cases. The arguments here also allow us to draw certain further morals about the role of phenomenology in the epistemology of perception.
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Notes
The term is from Fricker (2003, p. 325).
The most popular strategy is to propose that the inferences are underwritten by tacit knowledge of a compositional meaning theory [see Lepore (1997) and Heck (2006)]. But such tacit knowledge, if we have it, is evidently inferentially isolated in a way that arguably undermines its ability to explain the rationality of the inferences in question. An alternative way to account for the rationality of the inferences without appeal to tacit knowledge is developed in (Balcerak Jackson and Balcerak Jackson forthcoming).
Following Brogaard (2016) one might also hold that quasi-perceptions are multi-sensory states combining input from visual perception (lip movements, gestures etc.) as well as auditory perception.
Of course, this feature of the general account is controversial; see Cohen (2002) and White (2006). I should note that even if we concede that the hearer’s justification for his belief about what is said depends on his justification for believing that his quasi-perceptions are reliable, the problems for the perceptual model raised below will remain.
On the view in Brogaard (2016), a quasi-perception provides prima facie justification only when it is evidence-resistant—that is, roughly, when one cannot help but continue to have the quasi-perception even when one has evidence that it is illusory. (The Müller-Lyer illusion is evidence-resistant in this sense.) It is not clear how to apply the evidence-resistance condition to Hans’s case, which involves quasi-perception of a momentary token utterance rather than repeated perceptions of enduring objects and their properties. But assuming that the evidence-resistance condition can somehow be made to apply, I see no reason why we cannot stipulate that Hans’s quasi-perception meets it. So even on Brogaard’s view some sort of explanation in terms of defeat will be needed.
Such an argument would ignore the perceptual model’s implicit commitment to what Pryor (2013) calls credulism, the view that there can be cases in which a subject has immediate justification for believing that p even though his justification is vulnerable to undercutting defeat.
Indeed, in this way the perceptual theorist can grant that ordinary competent speakers typically come to have many justified beliefs about the meanings of sentences, just as the inferentialist claims. But for the perceptual theorist, unlike the inferentialist, such beliefs paradigmatically play no role in explaining comprehension in particular cases; they are “epistemically downstream” of the comprehension of individual utterances.
It is possible that this revised account is in fact closer to the view that Fricker actually has in mind.
According to Austin (1975, p. 96), the phatic act is the element of a speaker’s overall speech act that could be reproduced just by mimicking the speaker’s sounds and gestures.
The perceptual theorist might object that (i′) is not strong enough, that a quasi-perception only confers justification when it involves the perception of some more direct and intimate relation between words and meaning—such as being an experience of hearing meaning in the words, or of hearing the words themselves mean that p. But this objection, like the initial move to (i′) itself, faces the worry raised earlier of being implausibly ad hoc. In the Interpretive Clairvoyance case, Hans has a quasi-perception as of Sophia saying that p. Why is this not enough, for the perceptual theorist, for Hans to have prima facie justification? Why do the words uttered need to play this very specific role in the experience in order for Hans to have justification? A further problem with this objection is that it is not at all obvious that ordinary competent speakers really do typically have experiences with this very special phenomenology. It is true that we often report our experiences by saying that we hear what the speaker said. But it is an open question whether this is really a matter of hearing meaning in the words in the especially intimate (and so far rather elusive) sense suggested. In general, the more demanding the description is of what the quasi-perceptions need to be like in order to confer justification, the less easy it is for the perceptual theorist to take it for granted that we really have them.
Goldman (1979) suggests that a subject’s belief is defeated at time t just in case she has available to her a reliable (or conditionally reliable) process such that, had she employed that process in addition to the process she actually used, she would not have had the belief at t [see also Lyons (2009)]. Significant problems are raised for this proposal in Beddor (2015). But in any case, it is not at all clear how the perceptual theorist could turn this into a plausible way of accounting for defeat in the cases that are our present concern. Notice also that Goldman’s proposal concerns only doxastic justification (justified belief), while the perceptual model is, in the first instance, a view of propositional justification.
Fricker (2016) labels this view “approved-list reliabilism”. It should be noted that approved-list reliabilism was originally offered as an explanation of our attributions of justification to the subject, and not as an account of what the subject’s justification consists in [see Goldman (1993)]. Goldman later invokes approved-list reliabilism as an account of justification in response to criticisms in Berker (2013a, b), as Berker notes in Berker (2015).
Since reliabilism has been mentioned, it is worth noting that the problem posed by the Interpretive Clairvoyance cases cannot be solved just by adding a reliability condition. Suppose, for example, that the perceptual theorist proposes that a hearer’s quasi-perception as of the speaker saying that p (by uttering E) confers immediate prima facie justification only when it is a manifestation of a reliable capacity to have true or correct quasi-perceptions. (This suggestion will be anathema to some perceptual theorists, such as Azzouni (2013), who wish to leave open the possibility that speakers’ utterances systematically fail to have the semantic properties attributed to them by hearers’ quasi-perceptions.) This revision is of no help in the Interpretive Clairvoyance cases, because for all that has been said Hans might be extremely reliable: if he is a typical monolingual English speaker then the vast majority of the quasi-perceptions he enjoys will be in response to English utterances, and we can suppose that they nearly always correctly represent the force and content of the utterances to which they are responses. It might even be the case that his quasi-perception in the present case is correct. Nonetheless, Hans is intuitively not justified. True, a committed defender of simple process reliabilism might not be moved by this intuition. But a committed defender of simple process reliabilism has no need for the perceptual model in the first place; for her, any reliable process for forming beliefs about what is said in response to utterances will be enough to account for utterance comprehension. [In fact, Fricker (2003) helps motivate her view by arguing (convincingly, I think) that process reliabilist attempts to account for comprehension such as Schiffer (1987) are inadequate, in part because they are vulnerable to clairvoyant-style counterexamples.]
This is at least roughly analogous to the reliabilist’s strategy of restricting the types of processes that confer justification, although unlike the reliabilist’s strategy it imposes restrictions that vary from subject to subject and time to time.
The restriction to“reasonable inference” here is meant to exclude cases in which the most appropriate response for the subject is to question the inferential link between p and q; we can safely suppose that the New Goat case is not one of these.
This claim is distinct from the claim in Stanley (2005) that the hearer’s belief about what is said depends epistemically on her beliefs about features of the extra-linguistic context of utterance. However, Stanley’s claim provides additional support for the conclusion that justification for beliefs about what is said is paradigmatically not immediate.
Pryor (2000) restricts the view to perceptual experiences whose contents are “perceptually basic” propositions. But Pryor does not say enough about what makes a proposition perceptually basic to be able to tell whether or not the view excludes (quasi-) perceptual experiences of the force and content of utterances.
Finding such a marker is the main aim of Chudnoff (2012), which acknowledges that not all conscious seemings confer prima facie justification and attempts to articulate more stringent phenomenological conditions on the experiences that do.
I am enormously grateful for the many discussions with Magdalena Balcerak Jackson without which this paper never would have been written. I am also grateful to Lars Dänzer for our discussions about linguistic understanding over the years, as well as to Jochen Briesen, Berit Brogaard, Eli Chudnoff, David Didomenico and Casey Landers for feedback on earlier drafts. The research for this paper was generously supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
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Acknowledgements
Research for this essay was partially carried out with the support of a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Council).
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Balcerak Jackson, B. Against the perceptual model of utterance comprehension. Philos Stud 176, 387–405 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-1021-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-1021-3