I’ve been thinking more about the possible reply that Stanley/Hawthorne types (hereafter SSIers) might offer in response to an objection to SSI that I presented.
Here is the original objection, and here is the possible reply that an SSIer might offer.
Truth: Main Way to Be Appropriate
To begin, let me say something more about linguistic appropriateness (as I understand it). The idea is that there are certain conventions/rules of conversation, much like there are rules for certain games. Take baseball for example. The sense in which it is inappropriate to run to third base from homeplate after hitting the ball is that it goes against the conventions of the game.
With respect to linguistic inappropriateness, the most obvious way in which something could be linguistically inappropriate is if it were false. Presumably one of the conventions or rules of conversation is to assert something only if it’s true. There are other rules such that under certain conditions it’s OK to say something that is strictly speaking false. The instances of loose talk that have been discussed in the past few posts might be examples of this.
But if a speaker is not in some circumstance where the rules/conventions of conversation permit asserting something false, then it would be linguistically inappropriate to assert something false.
I suspect that one of the main ways in which an assertion can be appropriate is that it’s true. Conversely, I suspect a main way for an assertion to be inappropriate is that it’s false. With this in mind, we may have the resources to explain away someone’s intuitions that what Hannah says is true.
Warning: Highly Speculative Arm Chair Psychology In Progress
Given that truth often goes with linguistic appropriateness, it would be very natural to quickly move from an intuition that some sentence was appropriate or “made sense to say” (as I sometimes here philosophers say about sentences uttered by persons in thought experiments) to having an inclination to think the sentence is true.
If that’s right, then we can explain away the intuition about truth in terms of an intuition about appropriateness that might then incline someone to think that the sentence is true.
Calling All Xphi People
For those of you who are worried about those kinds of armchair psychological explanations, I can at least outline a preliminary test for this. If the intuition in High Stakes Hannah is an intuition about truth that is not influenced by intuitions about linguistic appropriateness, then one would expect a similar strength intuition about falsity to arise in cases where Hannah is less conciliatory.
Suppose when told of the practical stakes in High Stakes Hannah said, “Well, I have really excellent reasons to believe the bank is open. So I do know the bank is open, but given that it’s important – let’s not risk it” Suppose we’re reminded that Hannah’s belief that the bank will be open is correct. Let’s call this Hannah “Confident Hannah” and Stanley’s original High Stakes Hannah “Conciliatory Hannah”
I don’t find it intuitive that what Confident Hannah says here is false. If there is a widespread intuition that what Conciliatory Hannah says is true (that really is sensitive to the truth of her denial of knowledge) – it would be odd if there weren’t also a widespread intuition that Confident Hannah’s affirmation of knowledge is false. One would expect a kind of symmetry in intuitions about truth/falsity.
If, however, what’s going on in the Conciliatory Hannah case is that an intuition about appropriateness of Hannah’s assertion is inclining some to think that what Hannah says is true and the appropriateness of what Hannah says is not because it’s true, then it wouldn’t be surprising to have an asymmetry in our judgements between the original High Stakes Hannah case and a High Stakes case in which Hannah is confident.
I know this is all quite rough, but I’ve been sitting on it for two days now, and I just wanted to get it out.
p.s. Jason Rogers pointed out a very interesting asymmetry between my most recent objection to SSI and Earl Conee’s. (Here’s a link to his comment). I’m starting to think a lot more about this asymmetry, and it’s raising a more general puzzle that I’m going to post about next. Thanks Jason!
(Posted from my Android Phone)
Just three quick comments: (1) You say that I “pointed out a very interesting asymmetry between my [your] most recent objections to SSI and Earl Conee’s”; it’s a minor point, but Earl’s objections, as they’re presented in the volume I mentioned, are directed against contextualism rather than SSI. I just took one piece of his case–the part about “loose talk”–and applied it to your cases. (2) The link to my comment doesn’t seem to be active. (3) You’re welcome! 🙂
Jason,
Thanks for catching both of those. The link should work now. I thought about that asymmetry all the way back from Florida.
I might be ready to post something about it tomorrow.
This is an interesting move to make against SSIers. But whose intuitions that what Conciliatory Hannah says is true are you trying explain by (roughly) pragmatics instead of semantics? There’s quite a bit of data now suggesting that ordinary people don’t tend to agree with Conciliatory Hannah’s self-denial of knowledge. See my paper with Sinnott-Armstrong, Hull, and Zimmerman:
http://philpapers.org/rec/MAYPIR
We also cite papers by Adam Feltz & Chris Zarpentine and Wesley Buckwalter that achieve similar results. The former paper (combined with our data) especially makes a strong case agianst SSIers like Stanley (at least against his argument for his view based on ordinary usage). Whether you ask people whether they agree with Hannah (see May et al and Feltz & Zarpentine) or whether what she says is true (see Buckwalter), people don’t tend to be on board. There’s a draft of the Feltz & Zarpentine paper here:
http://philpapers.org/rec/FELDYK
So it’s really starting to look like this asymmetry in intuitions about the bank cases is mostly occurring among philosophers exclusively (given it’s widespread acceptance in the literature). Yet it seems like you’re agreeing with Stanley that there is this ordinary intuition or piece of usage to be explained. Or are you just taking on Stanley’s assumption for the sake of argument and attempting to reveal a problem with it?
I suppose your idea here could be used as a kind of explanation of why philosophers get this intuition (or, probably my preferred phrasing, an explanation of why they think they’re intuition is about what they say it’s about when it’s not). But I guess I prefer a different error theory in this case. (I think it has more to with some theoretical concern to deal with skepticism that has shifted their thinking here or their use of this word "knows" away from ordinary thinking and usage. Well, at least this sounds like the right explanation of the start of it being widely accepted by contextualists. I don’t think that explains Stanley since he’s appropriately not overly concerned with skepticism. But he may just be inheriting this all from the rise of contextualism. This is fairly speculative, though.)
So, I think it’s important and useful to consider cases like Confident Hannah and that they reveal a problem for SSiers, especially Stanley’s view. (Some of the studies I mention test cases that are pretty close to your Confident Hannah, but not exactly. Given the data so far, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if, as you predict, they would think what she says is true or agree with her attribution of knowledge.) But I’m not sure I agree exactly with what you’re suggesting it reveals is going wrong.