In the last post, I presented an objection to one of the main motivations for Subject Sensitive Invariantism (here).
There is an obvious difference between the Guard Dog and Contractor cases on the one hand and Stanley’s cases on the other.
Stanley could argue that one obvious difference between Low Stakes/High Stakes case is that what Hannah utters in both cases is intuitively true.
In the Guard Dog case, if the speaker utters “That’s not a dog. I need a dog.” to indicate that the dog in question doesn’t have a property constitutive of dogs to a sufficiently high degree (given the practical stakes), we don’t have the intuition that what the speaker says is true.
The assertions in the Guard Dog case and the Contractor case might be all-things-considered conversationally appropriate. They may make sense. It may be that the pragmatically conveyed content is true. But it is not intuitive that the literal semantic content of the assertion is true.
I think I have a response, but I want to mull it over before I lay it out. I thought it was still worth posting the objection.
(Posted from my Android Phone)
I think you’re right that this is the kind of line Stanley would likely push. But it doesn’t have any sway with me since I don’t get the intuition that Hannah doesn’t know in high stakes anyway! It doesn’t even seem to me like there’s any pragmatic sense in which what she says could be strictly speaking false but appropriate in some way. It just sounds wrong on all accounts. That’s what the folk seem to think too, given recent studies. They tend to think she knows, so there’s no room for a semantic or pragmatic explanation of their denying her knowledge (since they attribute it).
However, I do think there are knowledge cases that do parallel the dog and contractor cases well. I think they often occur when we try to motivate skepticism to non-philosophy people. We say things like, “you don’t *know* that you’re not a BIV” (putting emphasis on “know” like on “dog” and “contractor”) or “you don’t know *for sure*” or “you don’t *really* know” etc. But then my problem is that these seem either just like the dog and contractor cases (so merely pragmatic) or just like cases of actually expressing a different concept with a different (semantic) content. Maybe there is a concept of *knowing for sure*, for example, that isn’t just some pragmatic implication of *know*. But I’m not really sure about that. I just think people are switching things up either pragmatically or semantically in such cases.
Sometimes people do this in the cases that are supposed to motivate contextualism too. But I only start thinking the person doesn’t really know if the proponent of contextualism says things like I’ve mentioned (putting emphasis on words and so on). Contextualists say the standards have been raised. But it just seems like the speaker is either implying something more (like in the dog and contractor cases) and that’s why it’s okay to deny knowledge or they are just asking for something more.
I’m interested to hear your response to this sort of objection from Stanley, though, which is presumably not along these lines. BTW, this has to be the longest series of philosophical posts on a mobile phone to date! I must say, I’m impressed. I don’t think I’d have the energy for it on my iPhone that’s lacking a real keyboard!
Thanks for another helpful comment.
I’m still thinking about a potential reply to this kind of objection. I’ve been jotting down notes through out the morning I hope to post something this afternoon.
Regarding blogging by phone – physical keyboard is the way to go. You’d be surprised how quickly you can type after you get used to the keyboard.