Pragmatic responses to skepticism have been overlooked in recent decades. This paper explores one such response by developing a character called the Pragmatic Skeptic. The Pragmatic Skeptic accepts skeptical arguments for the claim that we lack good evidence for our ordinary beliefs, and that they do not constitute knowledge. However, they do not think we should give up our beliefs in light of these skeptical conclusions. Rather, we should retain them, since we have good practical reasons for doing so. This (...) takes the sting out of skepticism: we can be skeptics, of a kind, without thereby succumbing to practical or intellectual disaster. I respond to objections, and compare the position of the Pragmatic Skeptic to views found in the work of (among others) David Hume, William James, David Lewis, Berislav Marusic, and Robert Pasnau. (shrink)

Formal Pragmatics addresses issues that are on the borderline of semantics and pragmatics of natural language, from the point of view of a model-theoretic semanticist. This up-to-date resource covers a substantial body of formal work on linguistic phenomena, and presents the way the semantics-pragmatics interface has come to be viewed today.

Those aspects of language use that are crucial to an understanding of language as a system, and especially to an understanding of meaning, are the acknowledged concern of linguistic pragmatics. Yet until now much of the work in this field has not been easily accessible to the student, and was often written at an intimidating level of technicality. In this textbook, however, Dr Levinson has provided a lucid and integrative analysis of the central topics in pragmatics - deixis, (...) implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and conversational structure. A central concern of the book is the relation between pragmatics and semantics, and Dr Levinson shows clearly how a pragmatic approach can resolve some of the problems semantics have been confronting and simplifying semantic analyses. The complexity of these issues is not disguised, but the exposition is always clear and supported by helpful exemplification. The detailed analyses of selected topics give the student a clear view of the empirical rigour demanded by the study of linguistic pragmatics, but Dr Levinson never loses sight of the rich diversity of the subject. An introduction and conclusion relate pragmatics to other fields in linguistics and other disciplines concerned with language usage - psychology, philosophy, anthropology and literature. Many students in these disciplines, as well as students of linguistics, will find this a valuable textbook. (shrink)

Intercultural Pragmatics studies how language systems are used in social encounters between speakers who have different first languages and cultures, yet communicate in a common language. The field first emerged in the early 21st century, joining two seemingly antagonistic approaches to pragmatics research: the cognitive-philosophical approach, which considers intention as an a priori mental state of the speaker, and the sociocultural-interactional approach, which considers it as a post factum construct created by both speaker and hearer though conversation. Istvan (...) Kecskes, an early proponent of intercultural pragmatics, was among the first to propose merging the two to form the socio-cognitive approach now core to the field. In Intercultural Pragmatics, the first book on the subject, Kecskes establishes the foundations of the field, boldly combining the pragmatic view of cooperation with the cognitive view of egocentrism in order to incorporate emerging features of communication. He argues that people cooperate by generating and formulating intention that is relevant to the given actual situational context. At the same time, however, because of their egocentrism they activate the most salient information to their attention in the construction and comprehension of utterances. Within this approach, interlocutors are considered as social beings searching for meaning with individual minds embedded in a socio-cultural collectivity, and intention is a cooperation-directed practice that is governed by relevance which depends on actual situational experience.Intercultural pragmatics is a rapidly-growing field, and the only subfield of pragmatics to incorporate features of intercultural interaction into mainstream pragmatics. This volume offers both a valuable synthesis of current research and a new way to think about pragmatics. (shrink)

When asked in 1962 on what he was working Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz replied: Several years ago Polish Scientific Publishers suggested that I pre pare a new edition of The Logical Foundations of Teaching, which I wrote 1 before 1939 as a contribution to The Encyclopaedia of Education. It was a small booklet covering elementary information about logical semantics and scientific methodology, information which in my opinion was necessary as a foundation of teaching and as an element of the education of any (...) teacher. When I recently set to preparing the new edition, I rewrote practically everything, and a booklet of some 100 pages swelled into a bulky volume almost five times bigger. The issues have remained practically the same, but they are now analysed much more thoroughly and the threshold of difficulty is much higher now. The main stress has been laid on the methods used in the empirical sciences, and within that field, on the theory of measurement and the methods of statistical inference. I am now working on the last chapter of the book, concerned with explanation procedures and theory construction in the empirical sciences. When that book, which I intend to entitle Pragmatic Logic, is com pleted I intend to prepare for the press Vol. 2 of my minor writings, 2 Language and Cognition, which will cover some of my post-war pa pers. (shrink)

Researchers have converged on the idea that a pragmatic understanding of communication can shed important light on the evolution of language. Accordingly, animal communication scientists have been keen to adopt insights from pragmatics research. Some authors couple their appeal to pragmatic aspects of communication with the claim that there are fundamental asymmetries between signalers and receivers in non-human animals. For example, in the case of primate vocal calls, signalers are said to produce signals unintentionally and mindlessly, whereas receivers are (...) thought to engage in contextual interpretation to derive the significance of signals. We argue that claims about signaler-receiver asymmetries are often confused. This is partly because their authors conflate two conceptions of pragmatics, which generate different accounts of the explanatory target for accounts of the evolution of language. Here we distinguish these conceptions, in order to help specify more precisely the proper explanatory target for language evolution research. (shrink)

Cognitive science is experiencing a pragmatic turn away from the traditional representation-centered framework toward a view that focuses on understanding cognition as "enactive." This enactive view holds that cognition does not produce models of the world but rather subserves action as it is grounded in sensorimotor skills. In this volume, experts from cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, robotics, and philosophy of mind assess the foundations and implications of a novel action-oriented view of cognition. Their contributions and supporting experimental evidence show that (...) an enactive approach to cognitive science enables strong conceptual advances, and the chapters explore key concepts for this new model of cognition. The contributors discuss the implications of an enactive approach for cognitive development; action-oriented models of cognitive processing; action-oriented understandings of consciousness and experience; and the accompanying paradigm shifts in the fields of philosophy, brain science, robotics, and psychology. ContributorsMoshe Bar, Lawrence W. Barsalov, Olaf Blanke, Jeannette Bohg, Martin V. Butz, Peter F. Dominey, Andreas K. Engel, Judith M. Ford, Karl J. Friston, Chris D. Frith, Shaun Gallagher, Antonia Hamilton, Tobias Heed, Cecilia Heyes, Elisabeth Hill, Matej Hoffmann, Jakob Hohwy, Bernhard Hommel, Atsushi Iriki, Pierre Jacob, Henrik Jörntell, Jürgen Jost, James Kilner, Günther Knoblich, Peter König, Danica Kragic, Miriam Kyselo, Alexander Maye, Marek McGann, Richard Menary, Thomas Metzinger, Ezequiel Morsella, Saskia Nagel, Kevin J. O'Regan, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Giovanni Pezzulo, Tony J. Prescott, Wolfgang Prinz, Friedemann Pulvermüller, Robert Rupert, Marti Sanchez-Fibla, Andrew Schwartz, Anil K. Seth, Vicky Southgate, Antonella Tramacere, John K. Tsotsos, Paul F. M. J. Verschure, Gabriella Vigliocco, Gottfried Vosgerau. (shrink)

_Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology_ offers a complex analysis of the pragmatic theses that are present in the works of leading phenomenological authors, including not only Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as it is often the case within Hubert Dreyfus’ tradition, but also Husserl, Levinas, Scheler, and Patocka. Starting from a critical reassessment of existing pragmatic readings which draw especially on Heidegger’s account of Being-in-the-world, the volume’s chapters explore the following themes as possible justifications for speaking about the pragmatic turn in phenomenology: the (...) primacy of the practical over theoretical understanding, criticism of the representationalist account of perception and consciousness, and the analysis of language and truth within the context of social and cultural practices. Having thus analyzed the pragmatic readings of key phenomenological concepts, the book situates these readings in a larger historical and thematic context and introduces themes that until now have been overlooked in debates, including freedom, alterity, transcendence, normativity, distance, and self-knowledge. This volume seeks to refresh the debate about the phenomenological legacy and its relevance for contemporary thought by enlarging the thematic scope of pragmatic motives in phenomenology in new and revealing ways. It will be of interest to advanced students and scholars of phenomenology who are interested in moving beyond the analytic-continental divide to explore the relationship between practice and theory. (shrink)

A Pragmatic Approach to Libertarian Free Will argues that the kind of free will required for moral responsibility and just desert is libertarian free will. It is a source of great controversy whether such a libertarian view is coherent and whether we should believe that we have such free will. This book explains and defends Robert Kane¿s conception of libertarian free will while departing from it in certain key respects. It is argued that a suitably modified Kanean model of free (...) will can be shown to be conceptually coherent. In addition, it is argued that while we lack sufficient epistemic grounds supporting belief in the existence of libertarian free will, we may still be justified in believing in it for moral reasons. As such, the book engages critically with the works of a growing number of philosophers who argue that we should jettison belief in the existence of desert-grounding free will and the practices of praise and blame and reward and punishment which it supports. (shrink)

Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View essentially reflects the last lectures Kant gave for his annual course in anthropology, which he taught from 1772 until his retirement in 1796. The lectures were published in 1798, with the largest first printing of any of Kant's works. Intended for a broad audience, they reveal not only Kant's unique contribution to the newly emerging discipline of anthropology, but also his desire to offer students a practical view of the world and of humanity's (...) place in it. With its focus on what the human being 'as a free-acting being makes of himself or can and should make of himself,' the Anthropology also offers readers an application of some central elements of Kant's philosophy. This volume offers a new annotated translation of the text by Robert B. Louden, together with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn that explores the context and themes of the lectures. (shrink)

This volume deals with the relation between pragmatics and the philosophy of mind.

I argue that the offense generation pattern of slurring terms parallels that of impoliteness behaviors, and is best explained by appeal to similar purely pragmatic mechanisms. In choosing to use a slurring term rather than its neutral counterpart, the speaker signals that she endorses the term. Such an endorsement warrants offense, and consequently slurs generate offense whenever a speaker's use demonstrates a contrastive preference for the slurring term. Since this explanation comes at low theoretical cost and imposes few constraints on (...) an account of the semantics of slurs, this suggests that we should not require semantic accounts to provide an independent explanation of the offense profile. (shrink)

In this article, I review textual evidence demonstrating that James and Dewey incorporated Kant’s ideas, even while criticizing him. I specifically argue that the pragmatic evolution of the Kantian a priori carried out by James and Dewey is a transition from the mental to the bodily. I further argue that the parallels between pragmatists and Kant, along with the transition from the mental to bodily, relate to scientific contexts in which all developed their outlooks. Though historically grounded, my ultimate goal (...) is to show that pragmatism and by extension Kantianism mesh with and indeed contribute to cutting edge ideas in fields ranging from neuropathology to robotics and AI to cognitive science, whether in the form of Gibsonian theory or enactivism. (shrink)

He further argues that it is necessary to rethink traditional conceptions of argument, and to find a position that avoids the limitations of both the highly abstract approach of formal logic and the highly contextualized approaches of rhetoric and communication theory.".

This volume brings together Habermas's key writings on language and communication. Including some classic texts as well as new material which is published here for the first time, this book is a detailed and up-to-date introduction to Habermas's formal pragmatics, which is a vital aspect of his social theory. Written from 1976 to 1996, the essays show the extent to which formal pragmatics underpins Habermas's theory of communicative action. They are presented in chronological order, so that the reader (...) can trace developments and revisions in Habermas's thought. The volume includes a critical discussion of Searle's theory of meaning, and Richard Rorty's neopragmatism. It concludes with Habermas's recent defence of his theory of communicative action, in which he reaffirms his view that interpretative understanding inescapably involves evaluation. This book will be an indispensable text for students and academics who want a clear and accessible introduction to the development of Habermas's theory of communication and its relation to his broader social and political theory. (shrink)

Professor Recanati's book is a major new contribution to the philosophy of language. Its point of departure is a refutation of two views central to the work of speech-act theorists such as Austin & Searle: that speech acts are essentially conventional, & that the force of an utterance can be made fully explicit at the level of sentence-meaning & is in principle a matter of linguistic decoding. The author argues that no utterance can be fully understood simply in terms of (...) its linguistic meaning, but that only a contextual inference can provide an adequate framework. In pursuit of this argument, he deals with the major issues of pragmatics & speech-act theory: conversational implicatives & indirect speech acts, the classification of illocutionary forces, the performative/constative distinction, delocutivity, locutionary meaning, non-literal uses of languages, the principle of expressibilty, & the difference between institutional & communicative illocutionary acts. (shrink)

This is a discussion of the state of discussion on pragmatic reasons for belief.

The central problem for pragmatics is that sentence meaning vastly underdetermines speaker’s meaning. The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning is bridged. This paper defends the broadly Gricean view that pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in mind-reading, involving the inferential attribution of intentions. We argue, however, that the interpretation process does not simply consist in applying general mind-reading abilities to a particular (communicative) domain. Rather, it involves a dedicated (...) comprehension module, with its own special principles and mechanisms. We show how such a metacommunicative module might have evolved, and what principles and mechanisms it might contain. (shrink)

I present a challenge to epistemological pragmatic encroachment theories from epistemic injustice. The challenge invokes the idea that a knowing subject may be wronged by being regarded as lacking knowledge due to social identity prejudices. However, in an important class of such cases, pragmatic encroachers appear to be committed to the view that the subject does not know. Hence, pragmatic encroachment theories appear to be incapable of accounting for an important type of injustice – namely, discriminatory epistemic injustice. Consequently, pragmatic (...) encroachment theories run the risk of obscuring or even sanctioning epistemically unjust judgments that arise due to problematic social stereotypes or unjust folk epistemological biases. In contrast, the epistemological view that rejects pragmatic encroachment – namely, strict purist invariantism – is capable of straightforwardly diagnosing the cases of discriminatory epistemic injustice as such. While the challenge is not a conclusive one, it calls for a response. Moreover, it illuminates very different conceptions of epistemology’s role in mitigating epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Does knowledge depend in any interesting way on our practical interests? This is the central question in the pragmatic encroachment debate. Pragmatists defend the affirmative answer to this question while purists defend the negative answer. The literature contains two kinds of arguments for pragmatism: principle-based arguments and case-based arguments. Principle-based arguments derive pragmatism from principles that connect knowledge to practical interests. Case-based arguments rely on intuitions about cases that differ with respect to practical interests. I argue that there are insurmountable (...) problems for both kinds of arguments, and that it is therefore unclear what motivates pragmatism. (shrink)

Pragmatic self-refutation is when one asserts something but one’s act of assertion refutes the content of that assertion. In this paper, I consider whether Donald Davidson is guilty of this when arguing against the possibility of alternative conceptual schemes.

In this book Gary Gutting offers a powerful account of the nature of human reason in modern times. The fundamental question addressed by the book is what authority human reason can still claim once it is acknowledged that our fundamental metaphysical and religious pictures of the world no longer command allegiance. If ethics and science remain sources of authority what is the basis of that authority? Gutting develops answers to these questions through critical analysis of the work of three dominant (...) philosophical voices in our time: Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor. His own position is defined as 'pragmatic liberalism'. (shrink)

This anthology brings together for the first time, in revised or new translation, ten essays that present the main concerns of Jürgen Habermas's program in formal pragmatics. Jürgen Habermas's program in formal pragmatics fulfills two main functions. First, it serves as the theoretical underpinning for his theory of communicative action, a crucial element in his theory of society. Second, it contributes to ongoing philosophical discussion of problems concerning meaning, truth, rationality, and action. By the "pragmatic" dimensions of language, (...) Habermas means those pertaining specifically to the employment of sentences in utterances. He makes clear that "formal" is to be understood in a tolerant sense to refer to the rational reconstruction of general intuitions or competences. Formal pragmatics, then, aims at a systematic reconstruction of the intuitive linguistic knowledge of competent subjects as it is used in everyday communicative practices. His program may thus be distinguished from empirical pragmatics--for example, sociolinguistics--which looks primarily at particular situations of use. This anthology brings together for the first time, in revised or new translation, ten essays that present the main concerns of Habermas's program in formal pragmatics. Its aim is to convey a sense of the overall purpose of his linguistic investigations while introducing the reader to their specific details, in particular to his theories of meaning, truth, rationality, and action. (shrink)

For the Intentionalist, utterance content is wholly determined by a speaker’s meaning-intentions; the sentence uttered serves merely to facilitate the audience’s recovering these intentions. We argue that Intentionalists ought to be Particularists, holding that the only “principles” of meaning recovery needed are those governing inferences to the best explanation; “principles” that are both defeasible and, in a sense to be elaborated, variable. We discuss some ways in which some theorists have erred in trying to tame the “wild west” of (...) class='Hi'>pragmatics and context-sensitivity -- including recent work that makes essential appeal to the information structure of a discourse -- and in so doing, offer a general recipe for defending the Particularist picture of utterance content and its recovery that we favor. (shrink)

Although fallacies have been common since Aristotle, until recently little attention has been devoted to identifying and defining them. Furthermore, the concept of fallacy itself has lacked a sufficiently clear meaning to make it a useful tool for evaluating arguments. Douglas Walton takes a new analytical look at the concept of fallacy and presents an up-to-date analysis of its usefulness for argumentation studies. Walton uses case studies illustrating familiar arguments and tricky deceptions in everyday conversation where the charge of fallaciousness (...) is at issue. The numerous case studies show in concrete terms many practical aspects of how to use textual evidence to identify and analyze fallacies and to evaluate arguments as fallacious. Walton looks at how an argument is used in the context of conversation. He defines a fallacy as a conversational move, or sequence of moves, that is supposed to be an argument that contributes to the purpose of the conversation but in reality interferes with it. The view is a pragmatic one, based on the assumption that when people argue, they do so in a context of dialogue, a conventionalized normative framework that is goal-directed. Such a contextual framework is shown to be crucial in determining whether an argument has been used correctly. Walton also shows how examples of fallacies given in the logic textbooks characteristically turn out to be variants of reasonable, even if defeasible or questionable arguments, based on presumptive reasoning. This is the essence of the evaluation problem. A key thesis of the book, which must not be taken for granted as previous textbooks have so often done, is that you can spot a fallacy from how it was used in a context of dialogue. This is an innovative and even, as Walton notes, "a radical and controversial" theory of fallacy. (shrink)

Critical Pragmatics develops three ideas: language is a way of doing things with words; meanings of phrases and contents of utterances derive ultimately from human intentions; and language combines with other factors to allow humans to achieve communicative goals. In this book, Kepa Korta and John Perry explain why critical pragmatics provides a coherent picture of how parts of language study fit together within the broader picture of human thought and action. They focus on issues about singular reference, (...) that is, talk about particular things, places or people, which have played a central role in the philosophy of language for more than a century. They argue that attention to the 'reflexive' or 'utterance-bound' contents of utterances sheds new light on these old problems. Their important study proposes a new approach to pragmatics and should be of wide interest to philosophers of language and linguists. (shrink)

Many children and adults experience significant breakdown in the use of language. The resulting pragmatic disorders present a considerable barrier to effective communication. This book is the first critical examination of the current state of our knowledge of pragmatic disorders and provides a comprehensive overview of the main concepts and theories in pragmatics. It examines the full range of pragmatic disorders that occur in children and adults and discusses how they are assessed and treated by clinicians. Louise Cummings attempts (...) to integrate the fields of pragmatics, language pathology and cognitive science by examining the ways in which pragmatics can make a useful contribution to debates about cognitive theories of autism. The reader is encouraged to think in a critical fashion about how clinicians, experimentalists and theorists deal with pragmatic issues. (shrink)

This paper offers a smattering of applications of pragmatics to epistemology. In most cases they concern recent epistemological claims that depend for their plausibility on mistaking something pragmatic for something semantic. After giving my formulation of the semantic/pragmatic distinction and explaining how seemingly semantic intuitions can be responsive to pragmatic factors, I take up the following topics: 1. Classic Examples of Confusing Meaning and Use 2. Pragmatic Implications of Hedging or Intensifying an Assertion 3. Belief Attributions 4. Knowledge-wh 5. (...) The Knowledge Rule on Assertion 6. Testimony 7. Asserting and Thinking of Possibilities 8. Concessive Knowledge Attributions 9. “Pragmatic Encroachment” 10. Epistemic Contextualism.. (shrink)

According to Millianism, the semantic content of a proper name is its semantic referent. Many names, however, lack semantic referent; hence, so-called ‘empty’ names. Empty names raise various problems for Millianism. T.C. Ryckman, Fred Adams, Garry Fuller, Robert Stecker, Kenneth Taylor, and Nicole Wyatt, among others, have defended Millianism against these problems by appeal to pragmatics . I introduce Millianism and the problems raised by empty names for the view, then examine Pragmatic Millianism , its strength, its varieties, and (...) why the previous arguments against PM do not succeed. I then provide my argument against PM: the view oversimplifies the complex phenomenon of association between names and descriptions. I discuss an objection to my argument and rebut that. Finally, I try to draw an outline of a positive view. (shrink)

This is a study of the political theory of the Enlightenment, focusing on four leading eighteenth-century thinkers: David Hume, Adam Smith, Montesquieu and Voltaire. Dennis C. Rasmussen calls attention to the particular strand of the Enlightenment these thinkers represent, which he terms the 'pragmatic Enlightenment'. He defends this strand of Enlightenment thought against both the Enlightenment's critics and some of the more idealistic Enlightenment figures who tend to have more followers today, such as John Locke, Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham. (...) Professor Rasmussen argues that Hume, Smith, Montesquieu and Voltaire exemplify an especially attractive type of liberalism, one that is more realistic, moderate, flexible, and contextually sensitive than most other branches of this tradition. (shrink)

Evidentialism is the thesis that epistemic justification for belief supervenes on evidential support. However, we claim there are cases in which, even though two subjects have the same evidential support for a proposition, only one of them is justified. What make the difference are pragmatic factors, factors having to do with our cares and concerns. Our argument against evidentialism is not based on intuitions about particular cases. Rather, we aim to provide a theoretical basis for rejecting evidentialism by defending a (...) “pragmatic” necessary condition on epistemic justification. We argue for the following necessary condition for justification: S is justified in believing that p only if S is rational to prefer (and, hence, act) as if p. In light of this necessary condition, the price of evidentialism is skepticism, or something close to it. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the search for explainable models and interpretable decisions in AI must be reformulated in terms of the broader project of offering a pragmatic and naturalistic account of understanding in AI. Intuitively, the purpose of providing an explanation of a model or a decision is to make it understandable to its stakeholders. But without a previous grasp of what it means to say that an agent understands a model or a decision, the explanatory strategies will (...) lack a well-defined goal. Aside from providing a clearer objective for XAI, focusing on understanding also allows us to relax the factivity condition on explanation, which is impossible to fulfill in many machine learning models, and to focus instead on the pragmatic conditions that determine the best fit between a model and the methods and devices deployed to understand it. After an examination of the different types of understanding discussed in the philosophical and psychological literature, I conclude that interpretative or approximation models not only provide the best way to achieve the objectual understanding of a machine learning model, but are also a necessary condition to achieve post hoc interpretability. This conclusion is partly based on the shortcomings of the purely functionalist approach to post hoc interpretability that seems to be predominant in most recent literature. (shrink)

Subject-sensitive invariantism posits surprising connections between a person’s knowledge and features of her environment that are not paradigmatically epistemic features. But which features of a person’s environment have this distinctive connection to knowledge? Traditional defenses of subject-sensitive invariantism emphasize features that matter to the subject of the knowledge-attribution. Call this pragmatic encroachment. A more radical thesis usually goes ignored: knowledge is sensitive to moral facts, whether or not those moral facts matter to the subject. Call this moral encroachment. This paper (...) argues that, insofar as there are good arguments for pragmatic encroachment, there are also good arguments for moral encroachment. (shrink)

We argue, contrary to epistemological orthodoxy, that knowledge is not purely epistemic -- that knowledge is not simply a matter of truth-related factors (evidence, reliability, etc.). We do this by arguing for a pragmatic condition on knowledge, KA: if a subject knows that p, then she is rational to act as if p. KA, together with fallibilism, entails that knowledge is not purely epistemic. We support KA by appealing tothe role of knowledge-citations in defending and criticizing actions, and by giving (...) a principled argument for KA, based on the inference rule KB: if a subject knows that A is the best thing she can do, she is rational to do A. In the second half of the paper, we consider and reject the two most promising objections to our ease for KA, one based on the Gricean notion of conversational implicature and the other based on a contextualist maneuver. (shrink)

Contextualism in epistemology has traditionally been understood as the view that “know” functions semantically like an indexical term, encoding different contents in contexts with different epistemic standards. But the indexical hypothesis about “know” faces a range of objections. This article explores an alternative version of contextualism on which “know” is a semantically stable term, and the truth-conditional variability in knowledge claims is a matter of pragmatic enrichment. The central idea is that in contexts with stringent epistemic standards, knowledge claims are (...) narrowed: “know” is used in such contexts to make assertions about particularly demanding types of knowledge. The resulting picture captures all of the intuitive data that motivate contextualism while sidestepping the controversial linguistic thesis at its heart. After developing the view, the article shows in detail how it avoids one influential linguistic objection to traditional contextualism concerning indirect speech reports, and then answers an objection concerning the unavailability of certain types of clarification speeches. (shrink)

Unique in both perspective and approach, this is the first book to use classical American pragmatism as an ethical framework for dealing with ethical issues in business.The book first explores ethical theory from both the traditional and pragmatic perspectives. Then, using the pragmatic perspective, discusses the nature of the corporation and its relationship to society, the various environments in which business functions, and specific issues in the contemporary marketplace and workplace.

Epistemology orthodoxy is a purist one in the sense that it separates out the epistemic from the practical. What counts as evidence is independent of what we care about. Which beliefs count as justified and which count as knowledge are independent of our practical concerns. In recent years, many epistemologists have abandoned such purist views and embraced varying degrees of pragmatic encroachment on the epistemic. I survey a variety of these views and explore the main arguments that proponents of pragmatic (...) encroachment have offered in addition to the main criticisms of the pragmatic approach. (shrink)

We propose that people typically reason about realistic situations using neither content-free syntactic inference rules nor representations of specific experiences. Rather, people reason using knowledge structures that we term pragmatic reasoning schemas, which are generalized sets of rules defined in relation to classes of goals. Three experiments examined the impact of a “permission schema” on deductive reasoning. Experiment 1 demonstrated that by evoking the permission schema it is possible to facilitate performance in Wason's selection paradigm for subjects who have had (...) no experience with the specific content of the problems. Experiment 2 showed that a selection problem worded in terms of an abstract permission elicited better performance than one worded in terms of a concrete but arbitrary situation, providing evidence for an abstract permission schema that is free of domain-specific content. Experiment 3 provided evidence that evocation of a permission schema affects not only tasks requiring procedural knowledge, but also a linguistic rephrasing task requiring declarative knowledge. In particular, statements in the form if p then q were rephrased into the form p only if q with greater frequency for permission than for arbitrary statements, and rephrasings of permission statements produced a pattern of introduction of modals totally unlike that observed for arbitrary conditional statements. Other pragmatic schemas, such as “causal” and “evidence” schemas can account for both linguistic and reasoning phenomena that alternative hypotheses fail to explain. (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss what I will call “skeptical pragmatic invariantism” as a potential response to the intuitions we have about scenarios such as the so-called bank cases. SPI, very roughly, is a form of epistemic invariantism that says the following: The subject in the bank cases doesn’t know that the bank will be open. The knowledge ascription in the low standards case seems appropriate nevertheless because it has a true implicature. The goal of this paper is to (...) show that SPI is mistaken. In particular, I will show that SPI is incompatible with reasonable assumptions about how we are aware of the presence of implicatures. Such objections are not new, but extant formulations are wanting for reasons I will point out below. One may worry that refuting SPI is not a worthwhile project given that this view is an implausible minority position anyway. To respond, I will argue that, contrary to common opinion, other familiar objections to SPI fail and, thus, that SPI is a promising position to begin with. (shrink)