Knowing about Sexual Assault, Having Enough Evidence, and the Contextualist Fallacy

Last week I wrote an op-ed in the Vancouver Sun about university sexual assault policies. One of the things I tried to do there was to draw a connection between some of the questions in that area and my own research into knowledge and contextualism. I tried to make the case that a kind of contextualist fallacy lies behind some attitudes about university sexual assault policies. I still think that's plausible and interesting, although there are certainly competing possible explanations. But a tweet I received in response definitely commits the contextualist fallacy.

The contextualist fallacy is the failure to attend to the context-sensitivity of language, allowing for the construction of a superficially apparently-valid argument that is in fact fallacious. For example, the word 'now' is context-sensitive. Sometimes when it is used, it refers to 9:47 am Monday, Jan 18. (In fact, that's the time that word refers to when I utter it right now.) Here is a true sentence:

1. It is before 10:00 Monday right now.

Actually, although it is before 10:00, it's not very far before 10:00, when I have to teach. So I'd better come back and finish this post later.

Evidence for presuppositions

One of the things evidential challenges do is to question what grounds we have for our antecedent beliefs. Indeed, that's one of the main things they do. Maybe it's common knowledge that we all believe that p, but we haven't thought much about why we all believe that p. This is just the sort of case where it might make sense to stop and wonder whether p—which is mutually recognized to be something we believe—is actually supported by our evidence.

I think that this observation undermines a claim Michael Blome-Tillmann makes in his book Knowledge & Presuppositions. The key idea there, as in his earlier paper of the same title, is to embrace a Lewisian from of contextualism about 'knows', but where Lewis's 'Rule of Actuality' is replaced by a 'Rule of Presupposition'—that which is consistent with the presuppositions in a conversation is not properly ignored. Ad Michael characterizes conversational presuppositions in terms of dispositions reflective of mutual belief.

Michael considers (p. 99) this dialogue:

A: I know that animal is a zebra.
B: How do you know that it isn't a mule cleverly painted to look like a zebra?
A: Hmm, for all I know it is a painted mule. So I was wrong. I didn't know that it is a zebra after all.

In a strategy unlike the canonical one (supposing that final A's self-attribution of error is mistaken), Michael thinks that A's final response is wholly correct, and that the initial utterance is false. He thinks that the painted mule hypothesis is relevant, even at the start of the conversation. Here's why:

[B] does not pragmatically presuppose that the animals are not cleverly painted mules—neither before nor after asking her first question. Since B asks whether A can rule out that the animal is a cleverly painted mule, B is clearly not disposed to behave, in her use of language, as if she believed it to be common ground that the animal is not a cleverly painted mule. For if she were so disposed, she would certainly not have asked that very question. (100)

This seems to me simply to be wrong, for the reason laid out in my opening paragraph. Asking whether p is ruled out by evidence seems to me wholly consistent with thinking it to be common ground that p.

(Although I think it's independent, this point points to the same conclusion, and has an argumentative similarity with, the one I press against Michael's view in this paper.)

Diary of a Narcissist

This is a recent diary entry by Reginald, a confused narcissist. 

Dear Diary,
I am perturbed. As you know, I've long thought that, if I'm not perfection itself, I must at least be the next best thing to it. I thank Providence every day for so far elevating me above the common man. It is no exaggeration to say that hitherto, I have counted myself among the very most beautiful and significant people in the world. But today I received a terrible shock. While searching the internet for further discussions of me, I happened across a paper by a philosopher called David Kaplan. What I found there shook my deepest convictions to the core. Kaplan argues that certain words—'demonstratives' or 'indexicals', he calls them—are context sensitive; that is to say, the referent of these terms can vary according to the conversational context in which they're used. My first thought, on reading this, was that it seemed like an interesting and plausible semantic claim. The referent of the word 'that', for example, is simply whatever it is at which my flawless finger happens to be pointing when I speak.
But that isn't all.^[*] It's one thing to recognise the general semantic framework—it's quite another to make particular entries in the list of context-dependent terms. Among Kaplan's list of context-dependent terms are the very dearest and most important to me! He includes on his list, for example, such touchstones as 'I' and 'me'! Can you imagine, diary? I—Reginald the all-right—dependent on such contingencies as conversational contexts? Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that anyone would so trivialise me. Needless to say, I am deeply shaken. Can I really accept that I am so unimportant? That there is nothing special about me, but rather than I'm just whoever happens to be speaking in a given conversation? The thought terrifies me. Tomorrow I shall read works by Gareth Evans and Christopher Peacocke to see if they might restore me to the glory I thought I deserved.
Fondly,
Reginald

'Knows' contextualism derivative from 'believes' contextualism?

Here's Brian Weatherson:

[B]elief ascriptions and knowledge ascriptions raise at least some similar issues. Consider a kind of contextualism about belief ascriptions, which holds that (L) can be truly uttered in some contexts, but not in others, depending on just what aspects of Lois Lane’s psychology are relevant in the conversation:

(L) Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent is vulnerable to kryptonite.

We could imagine a theorist who says that whether (L) can be uttered truly depends on whether it matters to the conversation that Lois Lane might not recognise Clark Kent when he’s wearing his Superman uniform. And, this theorist might continue, this isn’t because ‘Clark Kent’ is a context-sensitive expression; it is rather because ‘believes’ is context-sensitive. Such a theorist will also, presumably, say that whether (K) can be uttered truly is context-sensitive.

(K) Lois Lane knows that Clark Kent is vulnerable to kryptonite.

And so, our theorist is a kind of contextualist about knowledge ascriptions. But they might agree with approximately none of the motivations for contextualism about knowledge ascriptions put forward by Cohen (1988), DeRose (1995) or Lewis (1996). Rather, they are a contextualist about knowledge ascriptions solely because they are contextualist about belief ascriptions like (L). Call the position I’ve just described doxastic contextualism about knowledge ascriptions. It’s a kind of contextualism all right; it says that (K) is context sensitive, and not merely because of the context-sensitivity of any term in the ‘that’-clause. But it explains the contextualism solely in terms of the contextualism of belief ascriptions.

I think that the kind of view Brian describes is very interesting and worthy of more attention than it's gotten. But I'm puzzled by his characterization of it. How is it that the knows-contextualism is explained by the belief-contextualism here? Belief-contextualism is a view about the word 'believes', which does not typically occur in knowledge attributions, the subject of knows-contextualism. So how could belief-contextualism explain knows-contextualism? In what sense is the theorist in question "a contextualist about knowledge ascriptions solely because they are contextualist about belief ascriptions"?

One might motivate knows-contextualism in a way reliant on belief-contextualism. It might look something like this: belief-contextualism is true. Therefore, for some situation, there are two contexts C1 and C2 such that in C1, 'S believes p' expresses a truth for that situation, and in C2, 'S believes p' expresses a falsehold for that situation. In some such C1, 'S knows p' also expresses a truth for that situation. In all contexts, 'S knows p' expresses a truth only if 'S believes p' expresses a truth. Therefore, in C2, 'S knows p' does not express a truth. Therefore knows-contextualism is true.

That argument gets the job done, but it doesn't seem at all like it must be motivating the combination of views Brian discusses. Why should one run through a metalinguistic principle about the relation between 'knows' and 'believes'? It seems to me to be at least as plausible that the corresponding views about 'believes' and 'knows' are motivated in parallel by considerations about propositional attitude ascriptions in general. I agree with Brian that someone who thinks (L)'s content depends on context for these kinds of reasons is also likely to accept the same for (K). But I don't think there's any reason to think the resulting knows-contextualism is in any sense derivative from the belief-contextualism. It's just that the same kinds of data motivate both views.

Knowledge and Modals in Consequents of Conditionals

Modals interact in a characteristic way with conditionals. Suppose it’s next Wednesday morning, and I haven’t checked the news in a while. Consider:

1. Obama probably won the election.
2. If Romney won Ohio, Obama probably won the election.

Assuming that the last time I looked at the polls, they looked roughly as they do now, (1) is true in my mouth Wednesday morning, and (2) is false. When I say (1), I say something like, ‘most of the epistemically nearest worlds are worlds in which Obama won’. When I say (2), I restrict the worlds I’m looking at: paying attention only to those worlds in which Romney won Ohio, most of the epistemically nearest of them are Obama-winning worlds. I knew going in that the winner of Ohio is likely to win overall, whichever candidate that is. (But I know it’ll probably be Obama.) So (3) is true in my mouth Wednesday morning:

3. If Romney won Ohio, Romney probably won the election.

Let’s suppose that as a matter of fact, Romney did win Ohio, contrary to my evidence. Still, since I haven’t gotten the bad news yet, my evidence still favors Obama’s having won the election. So when I say (1), it’s true. So is (3). If we look naively, this will appear puzzling. It looks like a counterexample to modus ponens, for the following are all true (not assertable by me Wednesday morning, but true):

• Romney won Ohio.
• If Romney won Ohio, Romney probably won the election.
• Obama probably won the election.

Call the inference from X and a sentence of the form "if X, Y" to Y, naive modus ponens. Naive modus ponens leads us wrong in this case.

The solution to this puzzle, of course, is that modals and conditionals interact in a subtler way than is recorded in the surface grammar of (3). The ‘probably’ modal takes wide scope; “if p, probably q” says that, restricting attention to the p worlds, q is probable. Relatedly, I can’t perform naive modus tollens on my probability conditional: Obama probably won; if Romney won, then Obama probably didn’t win; therefore, Romney didn’t win.

The same goes for ‘might’ and ‘must’. Suppose I have seen election results for every state except Ohio, and I know for certain that the winner of Ohio won the election. Then I may truly say:

4. If Romney won Ohio, Romney must have won the election.
5. If Obama won Ohio, Obama must have won the election.

It doesn’t follow from the fact that Romney did win Ohio that I’d express a truth if I said “Romney must have won the election”. Indeed, it’s false—for all I know, Obama might have won. Sentence (4) says that, of all the Romney-winning-Ohio worlds, he wins the election in them.

This is all very different from the way that conditionals interact with non-modal claims. Suppose I truly say to myself:

6. If the carpenter was here today, the picture is on the wall.

Suppose also that the carpenter was there then (the place and time where I said (6)). This entails that the picture was on the wall. Or if the picture is not on the wall, the truth of (6) entails that the carpenter wasn’t there. In other words, with non-modal consequents, you can perform naive modus ponens and modus tollens on conditionals.

Knowledge patterns with the modals. Suppose you’re trying to decide whether to trust someone. I might truly say:

7. If he’s lying, you know he’ll just deny everything later.

This can be true even though (a) he is lying, and (b) you don’t know that he’ll deny everything later. For all you know, he’s honest, and will confirm everything. Indeed, you know that you don’t know he’ll deny everything later. But you can’t reason from this known fact and (7) to the conclusion that he isn’t lying. So naive modus ponens and modus tollens are mistakes here, just as in the cases of the obvious modals like might, must, and probably.

I think this is pretty decent evidence in favor of views like mine that treat ‘knows’ as either something a lot like a modal or a literal instance of a modal. I say, broadly with David Lewis, that ‘knows p’ is an evidential quantifier: it says of a given set of worlds that one’s evidence eliminates all the not-p worlds. When it appears in the consequent of a conditional, it’s very natural to restrict the set with the antecedent. So “If X, S knows p” says, first restrict your attention only to the X worlds; S’s evidence eliminates the not-p worlds that remain.

Christoph Jäger on knowledge, contextualism and assertion

Christoph Jäger argues in a recent Analysis paper that contextualism and the knowledge norm of assertion are jointly untenable. Here’s my reconstruction of Jäger’s argument. (My numbering will differ from his.) Suppose that Keith has hands and the usual epistemic access to them. Also, Keith is a contextualist. For some two contexts, C-LOW and C-HIGH,

1. In C-LOW, “Keith knows that he has hands” is true.
2. In C-HIGH, “Keith knows that he has hands” is false.
3. In C-HIGH, Keith may appropriately state his contextualist theory.
4. In C-HIGH, “Keith knows his contextualist theory” is true.
5. In C-HIGH, “Keith knows that in C-LOW, ‘Keith knows that he has hands’ is true” is true.
6. In C-HIGH, “Keith knows that he has hands” is true.

But (6) contradicts (2), so something is wrong. Jäger says that it’s either contextualism or the knowledge norm that has to go. The first two premises are standard contextualist fare. A modest closure principle is invoked in the step from (5) to (6)—but it looks fine. The move from (3) to (4) follows from Jäger's version of the knowledge norm of assertion, which I do not contest. There are two action points here: the moves to lines (3) and (5). We consider them in turn.

Why should we accept (3)? Jäger introduces the set-up thus:

Consider a conversational context in which the contextualist states his theory. Such contexts are paradigmatic epistemology or 'philosophy classroom' contexts in which sceptical hypotheses are salient and taken seriously.

This appears to me to be mere assertion; why should classroom contexts be skeptical ones? I know that David Lewis said they were, but David Lewis said a lot of silly things in that paper. This just isn’t a commitment of contextualism per se. Contextualism is a linguistic thesis, made on the basis of, among other things, facts about linguistic use. If we were really taking skepticism seriously, we would not help ourselves to such facts. Some contexts in which epistemology of this sort is being performed—this one, for instance—are not very skeptical at all.

Actually, I think, there is a deeper problem for Jäger’s claim to (3). Contextualism is a controversial theory; lots of smart people think it’s wrong. It’s a theory that I accept, but I don’t think the acceptance here is a kind of outright belief, and I don’t think my statements of contextualism are appropriately regarded as assertions—as attempts to transmit knowledge. But the kind of “appropriate stating” at issue in (3) would have to be assertions in order for a knowledge norm of the latter to put any pressure on the move to (4). It’s far from obvious that anyone in ordinary contexts (let along skeptical ones) should go around asserting that contextualism is true. (And I say this as a contextualist! I think contextualism looks like the best theory. That doesn’t make it a thing to assert in ordinary contexts.)

So there are two pretty serious problems with premise (3). Now let’s set aside those problems for the purpose of further argument, and consider line (5). The inference from (4) to (5) is supposed to follow directly from the content of the contextualist theory. Jäger writes:

[Someone denying this step] would have to argue that the contextualist can legitimately deny [(5)], i.e. deny that he knows when he asserts his theory, in CHigh, that there are low-standards contexts in which (it is true to say that) he knows that he has hands. The claim that there are such quotidian contexts, however, is a cornerstone of classical, anti-sceptical forms of contextualism.

I don’t feel the motivation here at all. Contextualism the linguistic thesis does not entail that Keith or anyone knows that he has hands; it doesn’t even entail that Keith or anyone has hands. (Obviously.) It is consistent with the truth of contextualism that you and I are brains in vats. So even if we became convinced that we could have high-standards knowledge of contextualism—say, because we have introspective access to meaning, and that access is more resistant to skeptical scenarios than perceptual knowledge—we could still abandon Jäger’s ship at the step to line (5). Sure, Keith knows-HIGH that contextualism is true; that doesn’t mean he knows-HIGH that he knows-LOW that he has hands—even granting whatever intra-context closure principle you want. We’d get that he knows-HIGH that in C-LOW, he’d be invoking a relatively weak standard if he said “I know I have hands”. It doesn’t follow that he knows whether he’d meet it.

So there are lots of ways to resist this argument.

Knowledge, stakes, and closure

I've been sitting in on, and enjoying, Carrie Jenkins's grad seminar in epistemology. Today, one of our grad students, Kousaku Yui, brought up a pretty interesting suggestion in response to Jason Stanley's stakes-relative approach to knowledge. I didn't recognize the point as one that I've seen discussed before -- if there is a literature on it, I'd be very interested to see it.

The worry is this. Jason thinks that when the stakes are high, it's harder to know. But stakes aren't just a feature of an individual at a time; stakes are high for certain propositions when the truth or falsehood of those propositions make a big difference. It's possible to be such that the stakes for p are high, but the stakes for q are low. For example, it may be very important to Hannah and her wife Sarah whether the bank is open tomorrow, but not at all important to them whether it will rain tomorrow. In such a case, they would need to meet more exacting 'standards' in order to know about the bank than they would to know about the rain. That's a little bit counterintuitive, but only in the way that pragmatic encroachment is generally a little bit counterintuitive.

But here's what might be a deeper problem. Suppose someone is in a situation like the one just mentioned -- the stakes for p are high, but the stakes for q are low -- but where the subject knows that if q, then p. If so, then it's easy to know q, but hard to know p; but it looks like anyone who knows q could easily infer p. Closure plus the possibility of a case with this structure looks like they entail that the stakes-sensitive view can't be right.

Do we have to say such cases are possible? I don't see anything that forces us to, but certain cases are very naturally described in that way. Suppose Hannah and Sarah have an important bill, as per the standard high-stakes bank case; it's very important to them whether the bank will be open on Saturday. Suppose also that they have a friend Franklin who is a bank teller, and they have some small interest in whether he will be at the bank on Saturday. Here, however, the stakes are low -- nothing much hangs on whether they're correct about Franklin's location on Saturday. Assume that they have a good enough position for arbitrary strong knowledge standards for the proposition that Franklin will be at the bank only if it is open. So we have:

• p: The bank is open Saturday


• q: Franklin is at the bank Saturday


• The stakes for p are high


• The stakes for q are low


• Everyone knows that if q, then p.

If Hannah and Sarah have a middling epistemic position with respect to q, then it looks like they're in a position to know q, but not to know p. But this violates closure.

Might Jason say that in such a case, the high stakes for p force the stakes up for q as well? He might, but it seems like a pretty strange thing to say. Intuitively, it doesn't matter to them much at all whether Franklin is at work on Saturday. Their bill situation has nothing to do with Franklin. Maybe we can wrap our heads around the idea that the bill makes it harder to know that the bank is open -- but can it really make it harder to know where their friends are?

Ignorance and Presuppositions

I have completed a draft of a new short discussion piece on Michael Blome-Tillmann's (2009) Mind paper, "Knowledge and Presuppositions". It is essentially a development of this blog post from a year and a half ago. (I'd forgotten about it, to be honest -- I rediscovered it as I finished drafting.)

My new paper: Ignorance and Presuppositions

I hope to submit it soon; any comments would be very welcome.

Against Contrastivism

A conversation last night with Yuri and Andy helped me to get clearer on the argument I was trying to press in my last post. Here's the much more succinct way to make the point. It's an argument against forms of contextualism that put relevant alternatives into the proposition expressed by knowledge attributions.

Suppose I'm in a nonskeptical conversation, talking about Henry, who is standing in front of a barn. I have no reason to suspect any funny business, so I say, sensibly enough:

(K) Henry knows that he is standing in front of a barn.

Here are are three pretty plausible claims:

(1) If there isn't any funny business going on, my utterance of K is true.

(2) If it turns out that (unbeknownst to me) Henry is in fake barn country, (looking at the only real barn) my utterance of K is false.

(3) My sentence (K) expresses the same proposition, whether or not it turns out that Henry is in fake barn country.

If you think all of these things, then you can't think that the proposition I express builds in the relevant alternatives. Either the possibility that <the thing Henry is standing in front of is a fake barn> is relevant, or it's not, but it's his environment, not my context, that makes it relevant.

So if you want a Schaffer-style extra-argument-place approach to knowledge, this provides a reason not to let that argument place be one for a set of relevant alternatives. You might instead be a function from subject's situations to sets of relevant alternatives.

Yesterday I also included a parallel argument relying on pragmatic encroachment sorts of cases. I think it's a good argument too, but this one proceeds on less contentious premises.

Are 'epistemic standards' contrast classes?

Suppose you agree with Jonathan Schaffer that 'knows' takes an extra argument place, and that variation in what fills this slot explains the context-sensitivity of 'S-knows-that-p' attributions. Knowledge relates, say, a subject, a proposition, and, let's call it, the 'epistemic standard'. Nothing yet is assumed about what sort of thing that is. Schaffer thinks the epistemic standard is a contrast class, or, equivalently, a question. So "George knows he has hands" can express either of these three-place knowledge relations, depending on the context:

(1) K (George, <George has hands>, {<George has hands>, <George is not the sort of creature who has hands>, <George has lost his hands>})

(2) K (George, <George has hands>, {<George has hands>, <George is deceived by an evil demon into thinking he has hands>})

We could disambiguate in English, saying, "George knows he has hands rather than stumps", to get something like (1), or "George knows he has hands rather than being deceived by an evil demon into thinking he has hands" to get (2).

Identifying the epistemic standard with contrast classes does much of the work that a contextualist might legitimately seek -- for instance, it disambiguates the sentence above into a modest one and one inconsistent with skeptical intuitions -- but I think there might be a few reasons to prefer something different. Here are two related challenges to contrastivism that are not, I think, general challenges to the shifty variable approach.

Gettier cases. Suppose Henry's in fake barn country, but you and I don't have any reason to think that's so. (Neither does he.) I say to you, "Henry knows that he's looking at a barn." My sentence is ambiguous; what's the shifty epistemic standard? We can get an anti-skeptical reading with a contrast class of, e.g., barns and silos. But the antiskeptical reading in this case is very counterintuitive. To get the skeptical reading, which is the standard one, we need the contrast class to include fake barns. But given our situation, it's quite mysterious how the fake barn possibility got to be part of the semantic content of my sentence. (Compare the possible world in which everything seems exactly the same to all three of us, but Henry is in real barn country.)

Low-Attributor, High-Subject Bank Cases. Hannah and Sarah are desperate to get to the bank before Monday, and they have good but not great reason to think they can go tomorrow. You and I don't know and don't care how important it is to them; I say to you: "Hannah knows the bank will be open tomorrow." Here are two representative possible contrast classes: {<bank open tomorrow>, <bank not open Saturdays>}; {<bank open tomorrow>, <bank recently changed its policy and will be closed tomorrow>}. The latter is needed for the skeptical reading, which is the intuitive one; but what about me and my context could make it the case that this skeptical possibility is relevant? Again, compare the corresponding low-subject stakes version, which seems just the same to me.

Now I'm a good semantic externalist. So don't take me to be arguing that in each case, the intrinsic similarity entails sameness of semantic content. The argument can't go that directly. Nevertheless, in the relevant cases, it does look to me pretty strange that fake barns should appear in my content only if Henry happens to be in fake barn country, or that the policy-changing case is part of my content only if Hannah and Sarah's stakes are high. Intuitively, these features to which I'm blind are relevant to the truth of the knowledge attributions, but they are not relevant to their truth conditions.

Contrary to contrastivism, the subject is not irrelevant; the subject's practical and environmental features do play some role in determining what alternatives are relevant. This, to me, suggests that we might not want to put the relevant alternatives themselves into the semantics of my sentence. Don't make epistemic standards contrast classes; we can let the shifty epistemic standard be something else. Here's a modest suggestion: epistemic standards are functions from situations to contrast classes. A given standard tells you, for any situation the subject might be in, which possibilities are relevant. The speaker's context fixes the standard; the standard and the subject's situation fix the relevant alternatives. So speaker and subject are both 'relevant'.

Notice, by the way, that you don't have to go along with the encroachment stuff  to prefer this treatment to Schaffer's. The Gettier case provides, I think, a less contentious way of motivating just the same point. If you're one of those contextualists who is motivated in part by denying pragmatic encroachment, then you should think that no standard will deliver different alternatives for situations that differ only in stakes. (So you'll explain away intuitions about bank cases.) But unless you're also willing to explain away intuitions about Gettier cases, you should still have the standards be sensitive to the subject's environmental situation.

Contextualism, Indexicalism, and Constrastivism

One of the questions I've been thinking about lately (unrelated to most of my recent blog posts) concerns the best linguistic implementation of contextualism about 'knows'. I've committed myself to contextualism in a couple of papers, but so far I have tried to avoid a commitment to any particular semantic treatment of 'knows'.

I take it the minimal commitment of contextualism starts with something like this: statements of the form 'S knows that p' can express different propositions in different conversational contexts. And to this, presumably, we add that the context-sensitivity of these sentences derives from the 'knows' -- it's not enough that various singular terms (the 'S's') or statements of propositions (the 'p's') are sometimes context-sensitive. But this leaves open some choices for what to do with 'knows'.

One choice is to treat 'knows' as an indexical, which refers to different relations in different conversational contexts. Call this "indexicalism." The other choice is not to treat 'knows' as an indexical, suggesting that something about it generates context-sensitivity in some other way. (It is unfortunate that 'non-indexical contextualism' has been used as a name for a different view, which is not a contextualist one by the standard of the previous paragraph.) Jonathan Schaffer has argued for a version of contextualism of this latter type. Schaffer's view, 'contrastivism,' is that 'knows' univocally picks out a three-place relation, relating a subject, a proposition, and a contrast class. The contrast class is often left implicit in sentences of the form 'S knows that p', and so it is filled in tacitly; since different contexts will suggest different ways of filling it in, 'S knows that p' ends up expressing different propositions in different contexts. (Schaffer uses his terms differently, too; he calls my indexicalism 'contextualism'.)

Schaffer's isn't the only way of being a contextualist who doesn't treat 'knows' as an indexical. Contrastivism is only one example of a view of this kind -- this kind of view needs a name! I really want to use 'non-indexical contextualist'... do y'all think I could reclaim that label? I think the view I'm describing is extremely well deserving of that name... Anyway, whatever you want to call it, there are lots of things besides contrast classes that might be arguments for 'knows'. I rather suspect that a view of this sort is correct, and one of my projects at the moment is to articulate such a view and explain why it might be preferable to any other form of contextualism.

So we have at least three different forms of contextualism on the table:

1. Indexicalism. 'Knows' is an indexical; which epistemic relation it expresses depends on the conversational context. As far as I can tell, no one has actually seriously defended this view, even though it's often taken to be the standard claim of contextualism.


2. Contrastivism. Jonathan Schaffer's view. 'Knows' univocally expresses a ternary relation Kspq, relating a speaker, a proposition, and a contrast class. This last is often filled in by the conversational context.


3. Non-contrastivist extra-argument-place views. (I guess we need a name for this one too.) 'Knows' univocally expresses a ternary relation Kspx, where x is something other than a contrast class, and is often filled in by the conversational context. Until we get more specific, we might think of x as standing generically for an 'epistemic standard'.

I'm curious as to whether these exhaust the options for the contextualist. They do if the only ways that 'S knows p' can be relevantly context-sensitive are for 'knows' to be an indexical, or to take an extra argument place supplied by context. Anybody see any more choices here?

Counterfactuals and Modals

I like the approach to counterfactuals that treats them as modals. The sentence 'if A were the case, C would be the case' says that, out of some restricted class of possibilities, all the A possibilities are C possibilities. Which restricted class is in play is of course in part a context-sensitive matter. The relevant class of possibilities is relevant for other modal language, too. I've argued, controversially, that this is the case for 'knows'. But there are much less contentious cases, too. Consider bare modals like 'might' and 'must'; these definitely take context-sensitive domains, and those domains look to play central roles in the interpretation of counterfactual conditionals, too.

There is a kind of conflict between sentences like these, uttered back to back in a given conversational context:

(1) If he were to break thorough his chains, he would save the girl.

(2) He couldn't possibly break through his chains.

The 'kind of conflict' here isn't necessarily a matter of semantic inconsistency. (The approach to modals and counterfactuals I have in mind has the second entailing the first -- if there's no possibility of his breaking his chains, then, trivially, all possibilities in which he breaks through his chains are ones in which he kills his captors.) It's rather something like a pragmatic tension. The 'couldn't possibly' claim requires the modal base to be devoid of cases in which he breaks through his chains; such a base renders the counterfactual trivial -- so the counterfactual strongly prefers a context in which there are some chain-breaking possibilities among the modal base. (Compare: "There's nothing in this bottle." "All the air in the bottle is musty.")

Given this connection between bare modals and counterfactual conditionals, it's pretty straightforward to see that certain equivalences will hold as well. In particular, these two sentences will, in any given context, have the same truth value:

(3) He can't phi.

(4) If he were to phi, then p and not-p.

Presupposition and 'Knows' Contextualism

In a recent paper in Mind, Michael Blome-Tillmann defends a form of 'knows' contextualism that is broadly Lewisean. His project is, in its broad forms, very similar to that in one of my forthcoming papers. In my paper, I argue that Lewis's particular suggested rules for proper ignoring are inessential to the central contextualist insight, which is that one can model 'knows' in a way similar to context-sensitive quantifier domains, and that maybe he should have just rested happily with the latter, rather than trying to articulate all the relevant rules. Blome-Tillmann agrees with me that Lewis's particular rules are inessential to his broader project, but, unlike me, he goes on to attempt the ambitious task of articulating rules that will do the relevant work. So rather than rest content with the main contextualist point, as I do, Blome-Tillmann argues for a different solution than Lewis's to Lewis's original, more ambitious project. The suggestion is to replace the Lewisean 'Rule of Attention' with a 'Rule of Presupposition':

(RP) If w is compatible with the speakers' pragmatic presuppositions in C, then w cannot be properly ignored in C.

Pragmatic presuppositions here are meant to be understood in the Stalnakerian way. The basic idea is that there are different ways to attend to skeptical possibilities; if you just listen to a presentation of them but continue to presuppose them not to obtain, then you can still 'properly ignore' them. But if our common ground shifts so as to include those possibilities, then they are no longer properly ignored.

It may well be that the Rule of Presupposition does a better job with cases than does the original Rule of Attention on the whole. But it does worse in at least some cases. Consider some expression PHI, used to pick out an individual, whose felicity requires that some p be presupposed. For example, the expression "the man sitting at the table" requires it to be common ground that there is a uniquely salient man sitting at a uniquely salient table. Now consider a sentence of the form "PHI does not know q", where p obviously entails q--e.g., "the man sitting at the table does not know that there is a table."

Intuitively (once we've bought into contextualism), some such sentences can both be felicitous and vary in truth from context to context, even when discussing the same subject and proposition. For example, someone in a skeptical context might say "the man sitting at the table does not know that there is a table" truly, even as, in another, nonskeptical context, someone might say "the man sitting at the table does know that there is a table" and speak truly. This is the sort of result contextualists want to capture. But I don't think Blome-Tillmann can capture it. Anybody who utters that sentence felicitously is in a context in which it is presupposed that there is a table. (The previous paragraph gave a recipe for coming up with lots of similar examples.) Blome-Tillman's Rule of Presupposition, then, cannot explain the difference between the skeptical context and the nonskeptical one with respect to whether non-table-including possibilities are properly ignored. And none of Lewis's other rules, besides the Attention one that Blome-Tillman rejects, looks well-suited to do the job either.

So I don't think that presupposition can do the work Blome-Tillman wants it to do in articulating what possibilities are properly ignored. I still think it's best not to get too worked up about these details, and rest content with the contextualist insight.

Conditional knowledge attributions

I'm going to be discussing an argument that I know Jason Stanley to have given, but I'm away from my copy of his book at the moment, so I can't cite it properly, or check and see who else has discussed it (or even whether it's original to Jason). I'll follow up if citation protocol ends up demanding it.

Here's a naive argument against 'knows' contextualism. (This isn't the Stanley argument I want to discuss; it's part of the set-up for it.) Assume contextualism. Now suppose you're in a nonskeptical context, and I'm in a skeptical one, and we're both talking about me and the proposition that p, a proposition with which I stand in a pretty strong epistemic relation -- one strong enough for your non-skeptical 'knows', but not for my skeptical 'knows'. You say: "Jonathan knows p." Now, according to this naive objection, I'm forced to say this:

(1) I don't know that p, but what you said was true.

This sounds like a crazy thing to say, under the circumstances, but it looks like contextualism predicts that it should be fine.

Of course, contextualism doesn't predict that (1) should be fine; the naive objection is naive. Contextualism avoids the felicity of this utterance by observing that it won't be assertable for me. What you said entails p (even your nonskeptical 'knows' is factive). Since I'm not in a context in which "I know that what you said is true" is true, I therefore can't assert that what you said is true. Indeed, (1) is Moore-paradoxical, or near enough, since it straightforwardly and transparently entails "I don't know that p, but p."

So there's a naive objection to contextualism and a good response on the contextualist's behalf. But Jason Stanley thinks the game isn't over yet, for he has a tweak on the objection to make it less naive in a way that he thinks will avoid the response. Take the same set-up as before; you're in a non-skeptical context and you say "Jonathan knows p," and I'm in a skeptical context where "I know p" is false. Now, Jason asks, why shouldn't I give this sentence?

(2) I don't know that p, but if p is true, then what you said is true.

Here, the second conjunct doesn't entail that p, so the sentence isn't Moore-paradoxical. Insofar as (2) also sounds crazy, we have a version of the objection that isn't susceptible to the quick response given above. (Does (2) sound crazy? Is it a natural enough sentence to generate clear intuitions? I don't know. Let's grant for the purpose of argument that it sucks to have to render this sentence assertible.) The contextualist, I contend, is not committed to the assertibility of (2). Although (2) is not Moore-paradoxical, because the second conjunct does not entail p, its infelicity can still be explained as a violation of the knowledge norm of assertion, since it's second conjunct will, in the relevant cases, be unknown.

Knowledge Entails Certainty

The idea that knowledge entails certainty is a very intuitive one. It's easy to forget this, because most of us have it drilled into us, early in our epistemological careers, that embracing a certainty requirement on knowledge leads to skepticism, and we're rightly convinced that skepticsm is crazy, so we start getting used to the idea that there can be uncertain knowledge. Someone can know that p without being certain that p. If we say it enough times, it will stop sounding like a contradiction. And most of us have now said it enough times, so that it has stopped sounding like a contradiction.

Faced with a choice between skepticism and uncertain knowledge, we should indeed choose the latter. But we shouldn't forget that it's an intuitive cost. Given the choice to avoid both, we should consider it seriously.

Is this sounding familiar? It's exactly the opening structure of Lewis's "Elusive Knowledge," but discussing certainty instead of fallibility. I think the argument goes through in just the same way. Contextualists about 'knows' are uniquely positioned to vindicate that knowledge is certain knowledge, and to do it without resulting in skepticism.

The basic structure of it is easy. Let 'knows' and 'is certain that' both be context-sensitive, and let it be that for any context c, the property picked out by the former in c entails that picked out by the latter in c. But a typical effect of asking or enquiring about 'certainty' is to induce a more skeptical context. So I might answer differently to the question "do you know that p" than I would to the question "are you certain that p". But once I've answered 'yes' to the first, I face strong pressure not to say 'no' the second -- or if I do, it will feel like a retraction.

So if you're a contextualist about 'knows,' then you can, if you want, think that knowledge requires certainty. And it looks to me as if there's every reason we should want that. "I'm not certain that p but I know that p" sounds crazy.

Contextualist Knowledge Norms

What should a contextualist who likes normative principles involving 'knows' say? Signing up to the knowledge norms means embracing something typically expressed by sentences fitting something like this schema:

(N) Iff S knows p, then S is permitted to phi

Some candidates for phi: S believe p; S rely on p in practical reasoning; S assert p. What I want to do right now is just outline the options for the contextualist who wants to make something suitably in the spirit of (N) true. I see four choices:

(1) Make the normative language contextualist. Now (N) is true in all contexts; "S knows p" is true in all the same contexts in which "S is permitted to phi" is true; the normative language shifts along with the 'knows' language. In skeptical contexts, "S is permitted to phi" will be false, while in nonskeptical ones, it will be true. In his "Knowledge, Context, and the Agent's Point of View," Timothy Williamson assumes this interpretation, and plausibly argues that the resultant view is pretty unattractive. If somebody says "S should phi," and somebody else says "S should not phi," and they're talking about the same S at the same time and using 'phi' to describe the same course of action, then we shouldn't think they're both right. (Jenkins and Nolan have a paper defending contextualist 'ought' discourse, though; I've been meaning to have a close look at it to see if it can help.)

(2) Limit the norm to the claim that (N) be true in any subject's context, leaving the right-hand side with an invariantist interpretation. If "S knows p" is true in S's context, then S is permitted to phi. This is DeRose's view about assertion. (His 2002 paper is not at all clear about how to interpret his version of (N), but his new book is explicit here. See my NDPR review for discussion.) We don't get the oddness that Williamson charges against (1), but there are reasons to be unhappy. For one thing, Jason suggested in seminar that this interpretation is ad hoc. I'm not sure about that. Maybe. Also, as Danielle pointed out in seminar, we do, at least apparently, get some truths that are in tension with what might be the spirit of the knowledge norms. If I'm not in S's context, for example, I might truly say "S knows p but is not permitted to phi." As I mentioned in seminar, DeRose has a defense that mitigates quite a lot against this objection -- in many of the relevant cases, we should expect speakers to adopt contextual standards appropriate to the subject's situation. I think this will work a lot, but not quite enough. (I'm worried about, for example, cases in which speakers are ignorant of the subject's situations. Here is a related blog post.) I'm also worried that there often won't be a determinate standard in place in a subject's context who isn't talking about knowledge (another blog post). I am working on idea about the assertion norm that is in this neighborhood, but, I think, gets around a lot of these objections; more on that soon.

(3) Make (N) true in some particular favored context. Suppose I'm a contextualist and I agree with Williamson when he writes that knowledge is the norm of assertion. One way to do that would be to say that the particular 'knows' relation picked out by Williamson's particular conversational context as he wrote his book is the invariantist norm of assertion. To take this strategy is to embrace a particular disambiguation of (N): Iff S knows(x) p, then S is permitted to phi. Now I'm not sure how plausible this kind of strategy will be in these instances (it certainly runs into at least some of the objections against (2)-type strategies), but it at least represents a position in logical space. I think there are some at least minimally parallel situations where this kind of strategy is correct. (This came out of a discussion I had with Derek Ball and Danielle Sgaravatti over dinner.) Here is an example of a normative principle that contains an uncontroversially context-sensitive term:

(M) S shouldn't murder anybody.

The quantifier "anybody" in English takes a context-sensitive domain, so in theory, we face the same kinds of questions about how to interpret this principle. Strategy (2) here is of course nuts; take some subject S who isn't talking about Derek, such that in his context, 'anybody' does not quantify over Derek. If S were to ask, in his present context, "is anybody taller than 6-foot-2?", the correct answer would be 'no'. According to the (2)-interpretation, (M) carries no prohibition against murdering Derek (who is tall). So the (2)-interpretation of (M) is not the best one. I think the (3)-interpretation of (M) is pretty plausibly correct; an utterance of (M) will typically be one about some privileged domain of individuals. A contextualist could interpret knowledge norms this way if he wanted to. I'm not terribly inclined toward this view, but it looks like a legitimate one.

(4) This is the kind of strategy I'm most interested in at the moment. Like the defender of (1), I want to make (N) true in all contexts, but I don't want to do it by exploiting context-sensitivity of normative language. Instead, I suggest that in at least some instances of the schema, the 'phi' bits will be context-sensitive. (Notice, by the way, that a contextualist needn't adopt a uniform treatment for all instances of the schema. There's nothing stopping him, for example, from employing strategy (4) for the norm of belief by arguing that 'believes' is context-sensitive, picking a favored context for the norm of assertion, and flatly denying the norm of practical reasoning. Norms must be considered one at a time.) Suppose I'm a contextualist about 'believes'. Then I might think that in any context c, it is permissible that 'S believes p' be true in c iff 'S knows p' is true in c. Then we can have 'knows p' and 'is permitted to believe p' swinging together, without the troublesome implication that two people could give contradictory advice, while both being correct. (Two people could each offer sentences that appear contradictory, but the sentences inside their 'oughts' will express compossible propositions.) Maybe you'll think this sounds totally ad hoc. I wouldn't blame you a bit; so far I've just pointed out a bit of conceptual space. But I'm working on a paper that pursues this strategy in some detail, hopefully along with a plausible motivation, with respect to the knowledge norm of belief. Again, more sometime soon.

Review of DeRose's Case for Contextualism

Here is a draft of a review of Keith DeRose's new book. Comments welcome.

Contextualism, Intellectualism, and Ignorant Third Persons

It's a little bit natural to think that 'knows' contextualism and the shifty kind of invariantist that's sometimes called an 'SSI theorist' or an 'IRI theorist' come to a bit of an intuitive draw considering two kinds of third-person knowledge attributions. High Howie has whatever features you think makes it harder to know, or makes 'know' express a stronger relation: he's thinking about skeptical possibilities, it's really important to him whether p, or whatever. Low Louie is just the opposite: to Louie, p's no big deal, he's not worried about it, whatever. High Howie says things like "I don't know that p," while Low Louie says things like "I know that p," and both utterances look pretty good, even though in some sense Howie and Louie look to be in identical epistemic situations -- they have the same evidence, or something like that.

(Now I happen to think that it's not at all clear how to make sense of that last stipulation. This basically amounts to a worry whether there is any correct generalization characterizing the difference between the shifty SSI-like views from 'classical invariantism'. But I'm setting that aside for now, assuming, as is usual in this discussion, that the sense in which Howie and Louie are in the same 'epistemic position' is tractable -- and does not at least really trivially entail that they're alike with respect to knowledge. I'll here use 'epistemic position' technically to mean the stuff that traditional invariantists affirm, but shifty people deny, comprise a supervenience base for knowledge.)

Elusive There

Elusive There. Try to go there, and straightaway it disappears. That is how walking destroys there.

Hawthorne against contextualist 'inappropriate'

John Hawthorne gives an argument that contextualists about knowledge face considerable pressure to be contextualists about terms that refer to things widely thought to be linked to knowledge, like 'is epsitemically permitted to assert' or 'relies inappropriately upon in one's practical reasoning'. I'm inclined to agree. He argues, however, that it's not at all plausible to treat words like 'inappropriately' as in the relevant way context-sensitive. Now actually, I'm sort of inclined to agree with that, too, although I'm not at all sure he's right. What I am pretty sure of is that his argument for this conclusion is pretty bad.

Suppose I'm in an everyday context and have pretty good evidence for the true p, such that 'I know that p' is true in my context. Then I go ahead and assert that p and rely on p in my practical reasoning. Now you come along in a more skeptical context where 'Jonathan knows that p' is false. Now you want to say, 'Jonathan ought not to have asserted p' and 'relying on p was inappropriate.' Hawthorne says that a contextualist treatment of this latter is implausible:

Assertability conditions and propriety conditions for practical reasoning just don't seem to vary in that way. The practical reasoning considered above is inappropriate, regardless of what an ascriber is attending to, and parallel remarks apply to the propriety of flat-out assertions of lottery propositions (in the setting envisaged). (90)

I can't read this as anything but a pretty blatant use/mention confusion. The relevant kind of contextualist can explain and predict that “the practical reasoning above is inappropriate, regardless of what an ascriber is attending to” is true. It’s exactly the same reason why, pace Lewis when he’s being sloppy, it’s not a result of contextualism about 'knows' that whether S knows p depends in part on what an ascriber is attending to. That, again, is just the same reason why it’s not true that whether you are female depends on whom I’m talking to. Your gender has nothing to do with me; neither, according to contextualism about ‘knows’, does whether you know p. And neither, according to the hypothetical view under consideration under which ‘inappropriate’ is context-sensitive, does whether your action is inappropriate depend on anything about me.