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So let’s talk about where I was headed with those last three posts on linguistic appropriateness.

We had four cases of assertion. I’ll give a quick summary of each with links to the original post.

George (here)
George says he has two hands. He repeats the assertion when some other speaker introduces the possibility of error.

Missing Ball and Missing Keys (here)
I’m thinking about skepticism and talking to someone who isn’t thinking about skepticism. They are looking for an item, and ask if I’ve seen it. I say I don’t know where it is.

Arnold and Brian (here)
Arnold tells Brian there are chips in the bar using “chips” in the American sense, knowing that Brian only uses it in the British sense, and that Brian is unaware that there is a different American sense.

Let’s assume those are all examples of linguistically inappropriate assertion (although I share Josh May’s reservation about the first case).

So where was I going with all of this?

Some Hawthorne/Stanley-esque SSI proponents (and some Contextualists) will cite cases like George as evidence for their view, but these views are (prima facie) at odds with cases like Missing Ball and Missing Keys. Assuming the speakers in Missing Ball and Missing Keys are in a context where the possibility of error is made salient, the inappropriateness cannot be explained by a lack of knowledge, the assertions both deny knowledge…so…the inappropriateness must be explained by something else.

One candidate explanation (as Josh May noted in one of the previous posts) is that the speaker has knowledge. The assertion in inappropriate because it’s false. This the explanation I favor. Notice, however, since the speakers are in a context where the possibility of error is made salient to them, this is at odds with certain versions of SSI and contextualism.

But if we adopt this explanation, what should we say about George’s case? We could, as Josh May suggests, resist the temptation to say George’s assertion was inappropriate.

Here’s another option. Notice that George is in a situation where he has evidence that the hearer may have slightly different application conditions for the word ‘knows’. They challenge his assertion by noting the possibility of error. It seems that George now has evidence that this person may use the word ‘knows’ in a peculiar way.

George is interestingly similar to the case of Arnold and Brian. For those who have intuitions that George’s second assertion is inappropriate, these can be captured by a norm of assertion (that I’m not quite sure how to spell out yet) involving an apparent disparity in the application conditions of a term.

Bonus: Notice that this explanation entails that the missing keys case and missing ball case might be doubly inappropriate…(this depends on what is going on in the mind of the speaker). If the speaker suspects that ‘knows’ has an impossibility of error constraint and is talking to someone who doesn’t, then it would be inappropriate to use ‘knows’ in a high standards way when talking to someone who clearly doesn’t seem to have a high standards constraint on the use of ‘knows’ – see how this is the a similar kind of inappropriateness as in the Arnold case.

(Posted from my Android Phone)

p.s. Mobile blogging from the beach might be my new favorite

4 Responses to “Where I Was Going with All That Linguistic Inappropriateness”

  1. Thom Blake

    I’m afraid I’m missing how this view is at odds with vanilla contextualism (a la DeRose).

  2. Andrew Cullison

    If the Missing Ball case and Key case were linguistically inappropriate/and a good candidate explanation for their inappropriateness was that the assertions were false, then we’d have a problem for vanilla contextualism, because (as I understand vanilla contextualism) vanilla contextualism would say that the assertions were true. I was assuming that the cases were spelled out that way (since the speakers are entertaining skeptical scenarios)

  3. Josh May

    I like your missing keys and ball cases. As you point out, they’re problematic for shifty people, like contextualists and SSIers. It sure seems someone knows these sorts of things even if the stakes are high or if the possibility of error is made salient. However, Stanley might have some room to maneuver a bit. He could say, “Sure, you know those things in those cases, but that’s because they have good evidence and the stakes aren’t that high. My theory gets the right result.” But I’m think there are modified cases that he can’t say this about.

    About your other option regarding George’s case: It seems problematic to characterize George’s case and the chips case as similar in such a respect. While dialects and perhaps certain norms relevant to them become important for the chips case, they don’t seem at all necessary for dealing with George’s. George’s friend isn’t speaking in some legitimate dialect of English or something. And I don’t think it’s helpful to start talking about his own idiolect here. He is (or at least should be) speaking English, and the dialect his friend is speaking, in this case. He’s supposed to be using a public word of English (in any standard dialect). So I think the best thing to say is that George’s friend is either not challenging George’s claim to knowledge or that he is but he has a bad view of what knowledge is (or, to put it more linguistically, a bad view about what that word means). So I don’t think the sort of norm that should guide Arnold’s behavior should guide George’s. George rightly uses the word “knows” as it is used in English in that case and doesn’t bend to using his friend’s poor use of it.

    We could probably cook up a case like George’s where idiolects make a difference. Maybe George’s friend often really does intentionally and purposefully use “knows” in this non-standard way as part of some game or something. But I wasn’t assuming that’s what’s going on in the original version.

  4. Andrew Cullison

    Josh,

    I think you’re right about Stanley. SSIers with practical component conditions can say that, and I also think we could construct cases that he might not be able to handle. I’m going to try that today.

    Regarding George, his friend may not be speaking a legitimate dialect of English…but I was thinking that the case was spelled out for all George knows, his friend could be using ‘knows’ sloghtly differently and legitimately. So, his friend may be speaking incorrectly, but George’s evidence may not support that in the given case.

    If the norm of appropriateness were conditoned on evidence of ambiguity rather than actual ambigiuty, then we would have parallel cases with George and Arnold.

    (At some point I need to stop dancing around the norm and articulate it clearly)

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