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The pragmatics of pragmatic encroachment

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Abstract

The goal of this paper is to defend Simple Modest Invariantism (SMI) about knowledge from the threat presented by pragmatic encroachment. Pragmatic encroachment is the view that practical circumstances are relevant in some way to the truth of knowledge ascriptions—and if this is true, it would entail the falsity of SMI. Drawing on Ross and Schroeder’s recent Reasoning Disposition account of belief, I argue that the Reasoning Disposition account, together with Grice’s Maxims, gives us an attractive pragmatic account of the connection between knowledge ascriptions and practical circumstances. This gives us the ability to explain away the data that is supposed to support pragmatic encroachment. Finally, I address three important objections to the view offered by giving a pragmatic account of when it is conversationally appropriate to cancel a conversational implicature, and discussing when sentences with true content can end up sounding false as well as cases where sentences with false content can end up sounding true.

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Notes

  1. See, e.g., DeRose (2002).

  2. The view that knowledge depends only on traditional epistemic factors is sometimes called “purism.” See Fantl and Mcgrath (2007) or Dougherty (2009).

  3. These are not all epistemic concepts—truth is a concept from metaphysics and belief is a concept from psychology and philosophy of mind, but these are the concepts that traditional accounts of knowledge have appealed to in their analyses of knowledge. Hence the phrase “traditional epistemic factors”—these are the things that knowledge is supposed to factor into, according to traditional accounts.

  4. See, e.g., Hawthorne (2004).

  5. See, e.g., Unger (1975).

  6. The threat from pragmatic encroachment is not the only threat confronting SMI, but it will be the focus of this paper. For a more thoroughgoing defense of SMI, see Dougherty (2009).

  7. Originally from DeRose (1992).

  8. Originally from Cohen (1999).

  9. This is (part of) the argument that Hawthorne (2004) levels against SMI.

  10. The term comes from DeRose (2002).

  11. Feldman (2007) also thinks that a pragmatic solution to these cases sounds promising, but he does not offer one.

  12. Dallmann (ms) explores this possibility at length.

  13. Weatherson’s view is substantially more complicated than this, but this is one central, important consequence of his view.

  14. This is because, in situations where an agent is deciding what to do for lunch, a slight decrease in the preference for chicken salad would make chicken salad a little bit less appealing, which would slightly raise the stakes regarding how certain the agent must be about the location of the other possible meal. And this would, in turn, raise the credal threshold between belief and suspension slightly, so that the agent, who once counted as believing that there was tuna in the fridge, no longer believes this.

  15. This was the reading that I originally gave to the first premise of the argument. An anonymous referee suggested the first reading of that premise, which I agree is the more natural one, and also suggested the objection given in the previous paragraph, which is the natural objection to make.

  16. See Fantl and Mcgrath (2007) or Brown (2008) for more on the use of knowledge attributions to explain and criticize action.

  17. See Rysiew (2007) for additional discussion and references.

  18. I assume that a JTB+ analysis of knowledge is correct. While such an assumption is common, it is not uncontroversial—but wading into this debate is well outside of the scope of this paper.

  19. Hearers need not be in a position to explicitly affirm the reasoning disposition account of belief so long as they have an implicit understanding of it. And it’s highly likely that all agents have at least an implicit understanding of the nature of belief. So, if the reasoning disposition account is correct, agents will have at least an implicit understanding that belief in a proposition is accompanied by a disposition to treat that belief as true. And because pragmatic reasoning processes are (almost) always implicit, that is all that is needed in order for this to be an accurate representation of the derivation of the pragmatic principle. Compare: very few people are in a position to explicitly articulate Grice’s Maxims (since very few people have read Grice), but that does not prevent standard agents from engaging in subconscious Gricean reasoning.

  20. Rysiew (2007) offers a similar argument.

  21. This discussion obviously just deals with Knowledge-Action Principles that hold that knowledge is sufficient for action.

  22. This would happen by the same process outlined in footnote 14.

  23. Indeed, knowledge is a much more stable attitude than belief is (see Williamson 2000, Chap. 3). Of course, Williamson’s position is just that knowledge is more stable than belief in the face of new evidence. Yet it would certainly seem odd if knowledge was resilient in the face of new evidence, yet much less resilient than belief in the face of slight shifts in preference.

  24. As he says in a footnote, the suggestion that there might be a pragmatic solution to these cases was given by Ernie Sosa during a Q&A while presenting an earlier version of the paper.

  25. Rysiew’s comments have kicked off a debate about the possibility of pragmatic accounts of the infelicity of CKAs. While a discussion of these issues falls outside the scope of this paper, see Dougherty and Rysiew (2009, 2011), Dodd (2010), and Littlejohn (2011). For background on CKAs, see Lewis (1996) and Stanley (2005).

  26. Brown (2006) offers a Standard-Shifting pragmatic account in terms of truth in certain possible worlds, but is not worried about cancellation or CKAs. She tells us that “‘S knows that p, but her belief wouldn’t match the facts in a really distant possible world’ [does] not seem obviously inconsistent or uncomfortable” (p. 428). While I agree that such an utterance does not carry with it the obvious discomfort that accompanies a CKA, this may just be because the technical talk of “matching the facts in a really distant possible world” serves to obscure the apparent contradiction in “it might be that q” without eliminating it.

  27. The fact that CKAs sound bad might be taken as an indication that knowledge involves some sort of full commitment to the known proposition. And while it might seem hard to explain this on a fallibilist SMI account, the challenge is rather easily met if what I’ve said here is true. This is because knowledge involves the adoption of a heuristic to take what is known as true.

  28. Fantl and Mcgrath (2007) offer an objection similar to Cohen’s in that it denies the possibility of cancelling the relevant implicatures without assuming that such cancellation must be in the form of CKAs.

  29. It is sometimes noted that in Grice’s petrol case, it sounds just fine to cancel an implicature without preamble (see, e.g. Fantl and Mcgrath 2007). This is the case where you run out of gas, and when you ask for directions to a nearby gas station, are told “There’s a station just around the corner. It’s not open, though.” Far too much is made of the felicity of this claim, as it seems clear that the person offering directions is being either dumb or unhelpful. Yet Gricean implicatures follow the Cooperative Principle—we should assume that our interlocutor is trying to be helpful, and that they are at least somewhat aware of the purposes of the conversation. If we stipulate that, in the petrol case, the person giving directions is intelligent and endeavoring to be helpful (suppose that you are speaking to a colleague), an utterance of “There’s a station around the corner, but it’s not open” will be confusing in the way described.

  30. Rysiew (2001) also makes note of the fact that some turns of phrase do reliably generate certain implicatures—although Rysiew talks about “universal” implicatures, rather than “generalized” implicatures. His preferred example is of the fact that when events are conjoined with “and,” we understood the first conjunct as having occurred before the second (as in ’he went for a run and he took a shower’) even though temporal orderings are not part of the semantics of conjunction. Rysiew puts this observation to a different task than the one appearing here.

  31. See Montminy (2007).

  32. This example is from Montminy (2007).

  33. Metaphor can also be used to support the point made in response to the previous objection. If I tell a close friend “you are not the cream in my coffee,” this is likely to cause some measure of dismay, rather than be interpreted as a neutral and obvious statement to the effect that my good friend is not a dairy product.

  34. Brown (2006) and Rysiew (2005) provide other examples of cases where a falsehood can be used to imply a truth without any infelicity.

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Lutz, M. The pragmatics of pragmatic encroachment. Synthese 191, 1717–1740 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0361-6

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