Nothing at Stake in Knowledge*

Context-Dependence, Perpsective and Relativity (edited by Francois Recanati, Isidora Stojanovic and Neftali Villanueva) de Gruyter Mouton, 2010

The paper is concerned with the semantics of knowledge attributions (K-claims, for short) and proposes a position holding that K-claims are context-sensitive that differs from extant views on the market. First I lay down the data a semantic theory for K-claims needs to explain. Next I present and assess three views purporting to give the semantics for K-claims: contextualism, subject-sensitive invariantism and relativism. All three views are found wanting with respect to their accounting for the data. I then propose a hybrid view according to which the relevant epistemic standards for making/evaluating K-claims are neither those at the context of the subject (subject-sensitive invariantism), nor those at the context of the assessor (relativism), but it is itself an open matter. However, given that we need a principled way of deciding which epistemic standards are the relevant ones, I provide a principle according to which the relevant standards are those that are the highest between those at the context of the subject and those at the context of the assessor/attributor. In the end I consider some objections to the view and offer some answers.

2013

In recent work on the semantics of ‘knowledge’-attributions, a variety of accounts have been proposed that aim to explain the data about speaker intuitions in familiar cases such as DeRose’s Bank Case or Cohen’s Airport Case by means of pragmatic mechanisms, notably Gricean implicatures. This paper argues that pragmatic explanations of the data regarding ‘knowledge’-attributions are unsuccessful and concludes that in explaining those data we have to resort to accounts that (a) take those data at their semantic face value (Epistemic Contextualism, Subject-Sensitive Invariantism or Epistemic Relativism), or (b) reject them on psychological grounds (Moderate Insensitive Invariantism). To establish this conclusion, the paper relies solely upon widely accepted assumptions about pragmatic theory, broadly construed, and on the Stalnakerian insight that linguistic communication takes place against the backdrop of a set of mutually accepted propositions: a conversation’s common ground.

Journal of Memory and Language, 2001

What inferences do readers make about "who knows what" in narrative worlds? We introduce the concepts of projected knowledge and projected co-presence to describe circumstances in which readers infer that characters possess information presented, for example, only in narration. Our experiments examine one type of evidence readers use to project knowledge. In Experiment 1, readers used characters' utterances as evidence to revise their judgments about characters' awareness information presented in the narration. Experiment 2 established that this effect is not due to the presence of just any utterance in the story. Experiment 3 demonstrated differential projection of knowledge for characters depending on whether they were speakers or addressees of the critical utterance. Experiment 4 suggested that readers make these inferences with limited reflection. Experiment 5 demonstrated that readers' judgment times for characters' knowledge is affected by the properties of the projecting utterance. We conclude that individuals are skilled in evaluating textual evidence to project knowledge and co-presence.

Review of Philosophy & Psychology, 2010

In defending his interest-relative account of knowledge in Knowledge and Practical Interests (2005), Jason Stanley relies heavily on intuitions about several bank cases. The cases we focus on are two that are crucial to Stanley’s project: one in which the protagonist does not have practical interest in the truth of the proposition she claims to know (Low Stakes) and one in which the protagonist does have such practical interest (High Stakes). We experimentally test the empirical claims that Stanley seems to make concerning our common-sense intuitions about these cases. Additionally, we test the empirical claims that Jonathan Schaffer (2006) seems to make, regarding the salience of an alternative, in his critique of Stanley. Our data indicate that neither raising the possibility of error nor raising stakes moves people from attributing knowledge to denying it. However, the raising of stakes (but not alternatives) does affect the level of confidence people have in their attributions of knowledge. We argue that our data cast doubt on what both Stanley and Schaffer claim our common-sense judgments about such cases are.

The Philosophical Quarterly, 2010

We discuss the 'problem of convergent knowledge', an argument presented by J. Schaffer in favour of contextualism about knowledge attributions, and against the idea that knowledge-wh can be simply reduced to knowledge of the proposition answering the question. Schaffer's argument centrally involves alternative questions of the form 'whether A or B'. We propose an analysis of these on which the problem of convergent knowledge does not arise. While alternative questions can contextually restrict the possibilities relevant for knowledge attributions, what Schaffer's puzzle reveals is a pragmatic ambiguity in what 'knowing the answer' means: in his problematic cases, the subject knows only a partial answer to the question. This partial knowledge can be counted as adequate only on externalist grounds.

According to the traditional account of knowledge, what turns a true belief into knowledge is only a matter of truth-relevant factors (evidence, reliability, etc.), and these epistemic standards do not vary across contexts. Still, our knowledge attributions seem to vary depending on practical factors. Some philosophers account for this variation by a shift in the warranted assertability conditions. The main way of fleshing out this proposal is based on the idea of conversational implicature generated by the maxim of relation . In this paper, I argue that this is not promising. The proposition that is supposed to be implicated in such cases concerns whether the subject is in a position to eliminate a salient alternative that is not knowledge-destroying. I will claim that in such contexts, this consideration is not more relevant than the question whether the subject knows, even if the stakes are high. 1

This work has four aims: (i) to provide an overview of the current debate about the semantics of knowledge attributions, i.e. sentences of the form ⌜S knows that Φ⌝; (ii) to ground the debate in a single semantic-pragmatic framework; (iii) to identify a methodology for describing the semantics of knowledge attributions; (iv) to go some way towards describing the semantics of knowledge attributions in light of this methodology, and in particular to defend moderate invariantist semantics against its main current rivals. Aims (i) and (ii) are largely clarificatory; in §1 I set out a single semantic-pragmatic framework and over the course of this work show that it can be modified to explain and distinguish the various theories of the semantics of knowledge attributions currently on offer. Aim (iii) is also met in §1. I argue that a theory of the semantics of knowledge attributions T must be able to account for at least some ordinary speakers’ intuitions about the felicity or infelicity of utterances of the sentence ⌜S knows that Φ⌝ (felicity intuitions) purely in terms of its semantics. I also identify a number of theoretical considerations about knowledge and argue that if T conflicts with any one of these considerations, we should presume that T is false. Aim (iv) is met over the course of this work. According to moderate invariantism ⌜S knows that Φ⌝ is true if and only if S confidently believes the proposition expressed by Φ, this proposition is true and S’s epistemic position with respect to this proposition meets a moderately high epistemic standard. In §§2 – 5 I argue that the main current rivals to moderate invariantism – attributor contextualism, contrastivism, subject-sensitive invariantism and assessor relativism – conflict with at least one of the theoretical considerations identified in §1. In §6 I argue that moderate invariantism accounts for some ordinary speakers’ felicity intuitions purely in terms of the semantics of ⌜S knows that Φ⌝; I also argue that it is consistent with all of the theoretical considerations identified in §1. Moreover, in §§2 – 6 I argue that no theory is capable of accounting for all felicity intuitions purely in terms of the semantics of ⌜S knows that Φ⌝, and that only moderate invariantism can successfully explain why speakers have all of these intuitions. In §7 I conclude that moderate invariantism correctly describes of the semantics of knowledge attributions, or at least does so better than its main current rivals.

Philosophical Perspectives, 2005

Discourse Processes, 1997