Abstract
Sometimes testimony merely serves to draw the hearer’s attention to something in which he believes, or will shortly come to believe, on an independent basis. The hearer might for example be able to perceive the state of affairs in question or recall perceiving it. But equally there are times when a hearer comes to believe what another says and there is no basis for his belief which is independent of the testimony itself. Such occasions I call occasions of “radically informative communication.”2 The problem is to see what sort of basis for belief the hearer’s confrontation with the act of speech can provide. Can we regard belief-formation here as rational, or as acquisition of knowledge, without assuming that from hearing the testimony the listener has acquired some reason for the new belief?
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Notes
My thanks to William Child, Arindam Chakrabarti, and José Bermudez for comments and criticism. I would like to take this occasion to express my general philosophical indebtedness to the late Michael Woods and my appreciation of his excellence.
I am not assuming here that “an independent basis” is necessarily the sort of thing which provides ratification for a belief, only that it does (causally) account for it. Thus an innate belief, or anything which the hearer already believes can be counted, for expository purposes here, among the beliefs for which there is an independent basis. If knowledge can be imparted by words, it will not be only in situations of radically informative communication that this happens. For there is the possibility that a belief already held becomes knowledge for the first time when a person hears a particular utterance (Compare the systematic “reconstruction” of our beliefs on a firmer basis when they have been subjected to doubt and found to lack sufficient ratification to count as knowledge.) In the text, I provide a notion of acceptance, i.e. so-called “Intentional Acceptance” which is meant to apply in either case, and to help to account in both for the possibility that a belief is rational or constitutes knowledge.
It may be possible to fill this out in terms of a notion of non-doxastic justification which is still mentalistic, along lines indicated by John Pollock in the appendix to Contemporary Theories of Knowledge, Hutchinson, 1986. ( As I am using the term “reason”, a reason for belief must always be a doxastic state such as judging or believing, so such ratifying bases would not themselves count as reasons.) If there are such non-doxastic mentalistic bases, and if cognitive rationality is the mind’s contribution to the possibility of knowledge, and if the gap between rationality and knowledge is always filled by the truth of operative judgements or assumptions, some of the latter must refer to the bases in question.
See M. A. S. Dummett, for example Truth and Other Enigmas,Gerald Duckworth & Co. 1978, pp. 2–4 or Frege: Philosophy of Language,Gerald Duckworth & Co. 1973, pp. 413–417. Note 18 of this paper relates to truth.
Bimal Matilal, in a paper sent to contributors.
These definitions are intended merely to serve as distinct, more or less stipulative, readings of “acceptance” (cf. note 9). Neither is a thesis about anything or meant to do duty for a theory of the conditions under which a belief from say-so is rational or constitutes knowledge.
Granted that when a false belief that p is operative in reaching the conclusion that q,this entails that the subject does not know that q, we cannot infer that it is necessary for the subject to have a true belief that p in order to know that q. One might call the kind of mistake involved in making such an inference a “fallacy of over-correction”. 8 8 The factiveness of an instance of p in C might be said to amount to this: any propositional constituent of C in which that instance of p is a constituent entails that p.
In that case, there could in principle be examples of Adoption Acceptance (namely where an utterance is not correctly understood) which do not fall under any sense of “acceptance” in common usage. It appears that both “accepting” and “comprehending” a saying that p entail that the utterance is a saying that p (they are “factive” in that respect). Furthermore, the point about comprehending may explain the point about accepting.
For insights grounding such principles, see Edward Craig, Knowledge and the State of Nature,Clarendon Press Oxford, 1990.
See Donald Davidson, ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, in Ernest Le Pore (ed.) Truth and Interpretation, Basil Blackwell, 1986.
Note that Intentional Acceptance applies both to adoptive cases and to cases where the belief is already held; they wouldn’t have to be considered distinct realizations of comprehension.
A strong thesis of non-autonomy might be that what constitutes comprehension of say-so can only be specified by reference to a larger whole, for example credence. I think something on these lines would mesh with my account, but I don’t attempt to make it out. A weaker thesis of non-autonomy might be that comprehension of say-so is an aspect of some limited set of alternatives and can manifest itself behaviourally only in those ways. The list might, for example, be said to consist of comprehending disbelief and Intentional Acceptance. As regards either a weaker or a stronger thesis of non-autonomy, the understanding of an unasserted occurrence of a form of words fit for assertion (e.g. a single disjunct of a disjunctive assertion) would still need to be brought into perspicuous relation with comprehension of assertion.
That model, characteristic of traditional foundationalism, seems to leave us after pointless delaying tactics with the need to know something which on initial assumptions we cannot know or even understand, namely the truth of the bridging generalizations. 15 It might be claimed that cancellation of assertoric force shows that a de facto as well as a normative link with psychological factors is definitive of asserting, in that assertoric force is absent when there is mutual knowledge of an intention, a mimetic intention for example, which would supplant any intention on the part of the speaker to express his own knowledge or belief. But I hazard that this opinion rests on the sort of “fallacy of over-correction” mentioned at note 7. (I discussed cancellation of assertoric force in ‘Stating, Asserting, and Otherwise Subscribing’, Philosophia,December 1981, and would still stick by much of what I said there.)
This description postulates a normative “individual connection” obtaining between truth and an instance of say-so. I am maintaining that this consideration is known to anyone who is able to identify say-so and is always relevant to the rationality of belief-formation from it. It contrasts to an “aggregate connection” between truth and asserting, which supposedly obtains as a matter of the actual frequency of true assertions in the total class, whether the claim that it obtains is supported a priori or a posteriori. (See discussion of “Principle T” in Section 2.) I concede that considerations about particular frequencies could defeat other reasons for belief, but doubt that considerations about aggregate connections are essential to the rationality of acceptance. In this, I take myself to be in accord with the philosophers of the Uniqueness School and their wish to reject the idea that knowing from words involves inference from “general correlations”. (It might be suggested that the aggregate connection could be converted into an individual one via talk of tendencies or propensities of individual assertions to be true. The final paragraphs of Section 5 relate.)
See Gilbert Harmon, Thought,Princeton University Press 1973, and John Pollock, op cit. for the origins of (but no accountability for) this picture.
The internal normativity built into the rough analysis of “saying” offered earlier was minimal. It might be claimed, further to this, that for one to have the concept, there must be a respect R such that for any p,if one understands an utterance to be an instance of saying that p,then one is aware that the utterance is correct in respect R if p,as well as only if p. R is of course truth, and the claim therefore amounts to the position that if one has the concept of say-so, then one has at least a rudimentary concept of truth. There is also the question whether radically informative communication would be possible among people who were unable to conceptualize this dimension of assessment. If not, and if the claim connecting “saying” with “truth” is correct, there is a strong rationale for the conclusion that possession of a (practical) concept of say-so by members of a linguistic community goes hand-in-hand with the existence in that community of a practice usable for radically informative communication.
Meaning Norms and Objectivity’, P. Geach (ed.), Logic and Ethics,1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 167–197. There I sketch an account of the nature and identity of a natural language, viz as a sort of idealized set of perceptual dispositions (constructed out of the dispositions of authoritative users). The aim of that account is to make room for the fact that individual speakers can be wrong about significance (wrong in their “competence” so to speak, as well as their performance), while at the same time accommodating the point that the significance of utterances is something inherently perceivable.
H. P. Grice, `Meaning’, Philosophical Review, 66 (1957), pp. 377–88.
For discussion of a framework of principles within which to treat such questions, see Christopher Peacocke, A Study of Concepts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992.
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Jack, J. (1994). The Role of Comprehension. In: Matilal, B.K., Chakrabarti, A. (eds) Knowing from Words. Synthese Library, vol 230. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2018-2_9
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