In this previous post, I briefly outlined how epistemologists sometimes take linguistic appropriateness into account.
Let’s grant the judgements about appropriateness in George’s case from that post.
In this post, let’s consider some more cases.
The Missing Ball
Sarah asked me where Simon’s ball was. His ball is our ultimate pacifier. The last time I had seen the ball was a few minutes prior in my parents’ hotel room, and I was reasonably confident that the ball was still in the room.
I was thinking about contextualism (no joke), and I wanted to tease Sarah. So I said, “I don’t know.”
“What?!” She had a temporary freak out.
“Well, I seem to remember that it was in Nana and Papa’s room,” I continued.
Now Sarah and I have talked about skepticism, and so at that point – I figured she’d know I was joking.
Claim: I think my assertion was linguistically inappropriate. (Perhaps I should say…my degree of confidence that it’s linguistically in appropriate is at least as high as they are in George’s case)
The Missing Keys
My dad was looking for his keys this morning. He asked me if I knew where they were. This next part didn’t actually happen…Suppose I had been looking at the keys, recognized them as his keys – but was thinking about skepticism. Suppose I had said, “I don’t know”
Claim: My utterance would have been linguistically inappropriate.
I’m not at the point where I want to start doing any theory, but I will say that if we’re in the business of taking linguistic appropriateness into account, then we should include the above cases.
I’ll also say that a very good candidate explanation that would need to be ruled out (and is at odds with some epistemic theories that tend to appeal to linguistic intuitions) is that I knew where the ball was, and I knew where the keys were.
(Posted from my Android Phone)
These are some interesting cases. I’m not sure where you’re going to go with this theory-wise, but I think this sort of methodology that appeals to linguistic usage is often okay. It seems to be applied appropriately in these cases but just not in George’s case in the previous post. I don’t think George’s(second) assertion is inappropriate, at least not in the way that would need explaining by anything like the norm you cite (which seems like a highly implausible norm to me, by the way). His assertion is certainly odd, but only because he’s asserting the same thing he said before after someone challenged it. That’s just socially awkward, just an odd thing to do. (But I don’t think that’s the kind of inappropriateness you meant to convey by the example. This could be avoided by him saying instead “What? That’s crazy. Of course I have hands.” But I think the people you have in mind would still think—wrongly, in my opinion—that this assertion is inappropriate in an epistemically interesting way.)
But, in the cases you mention here, the relevant assertions are inappropriate in an epistemically interesting way. I think it’s inappropriate because, as you say, you *knew* the relevant things someone was asking you about, so you should have said so. I don’t think that what’s odd about George’s assertion is that he didn’t know the relevant claim (he did). But I’m not at all moved by cases that are supposed to support contextualism or similar views (like Stanley’s); and the folk don’t seem to either, as recent studies are indicating!