Knowledge and Questions. (Grazer Philosophische Studien)

Knowledge and Questions

Grazer Philosophische Studien inteRnationale ZeitsCHRiFt FÜR analYtisCHe PHilosoPHie

gegRÜndet Von Rudolf Haller HeRausgegeBen Von Johannes l. Brandl Marian david Maria e. Reicher leopold stubenberg

VOL 77 - 2008

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

Knowledge and Questions

Edited by

Franck Lihoreau

Die Herausgabe der GPS erfolgt mit Unterstützung des Instituts für Philosophie der Universität Graz, der Forschungsstelle für Österreichische Philosophie, Graz, und wird von folgenden Institutionen gefördert: Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur, Wien Abteilung für Wissenschaft und Forschung des Amtes der Steiermärkischen Landesregierung, Graz Kulturreferat der Stadt Graz

In memoriam Georg Henrik von Wright

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. Lay out: Thomas Binder, Graz ISBN: 978-90-420-2475-5 ISSN: 0165-9227 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in The Netherlands

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii

Christopher HOOKWAY: Questions, Epistemology, and Inquiries . . . .

1

Claudine TIERCELIN: The Fixation of Knowledge and the QuestionAnswer Process of Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

23

Pascal ENGEL: In What Sense Is Knowledge the Norm of Assertion?

45

Ian RUMFITT: Knowledge by Deduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

61

Paul EGRÉ: Q uestion-Embedding and Factivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

85

Martin MONTMINY: Cheap Knowledge and Easy Questions . . . . . .

127

Berit BR OGAARD: Kno wledge-The and P ropositional A ttitude Ascriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

147

Maria ALONI: Concealed Q uestions Under Cover . . . . . . . . . . . .

191

Daniele SGARAVATTI & E lia Z ARDINI: Knowing How to Establish Intellectualism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

217

Franck LIHOREAU: Knowledge-How and Ability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

263

Stephen HETHERINGT ON: Kno wing-That, Knowing-How, and Knowing Philosophically . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

307

Duncan PRIT CHARD: Kno wing the Answ er, U nderstanding and Epistemic Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

325

Grazer Philosophische Studien 78 (2008), vii–xxiv.

INTRODUCTION Franck LIHOREAU Universidade Nova de Lisboa The topic of the r elationships betw een kno wledge and questions is of utmost impor tance to epistemology , philosophical logic, and the philosophy of language, as it raises a large number of issues in each of these fields and at their intersection. M ost of these issues ar e dealt with in the papers collected in this special v olume of Grazer Philosophische Studien. Lots of other highly r elevant and v ery inter esting topics ar e addr essed too. Surveying the papers in the v olume will thus amount, in a sense, to giving an overview of the current state of the debates o ver the issue(s) of knowledge and questions. Analytic epistemology, especially in the post-G ettier era, has put considerable emphasis on the “ standard” analysis of kno wledge as justifi ed true belief, the first formulation of which is, more often than not, credited to Plato’s Meno (98a). However, think a minute about the way in which Socrates, in the same Meno, makes his interlocutor “give birth” to a geometrical truth of which he seemed totally ignorant before, by asking him a series of questions that he answers correctly (82a–86a). This suggests an “alternative” approach to knowledge, whereby the ability to understand, to answer, and to formulate questions becomes of prime epistemological importance. Variants of such an approach have been endorsed by authors like Castañeda (1980), White (1982), Craig (1990), and others as well. The first two papers in the volume relate to this alternative line of thought. In the opening paper of the v olume, “Questions, Epistemology, and Inquiries,” Christopher HOOKWAY highlights four impor tant respects in which questions can be thought to be erlevant to epistemology. All four respects relate to the practices of epistemic ev aluation that occur when we are engaged in activities of inquir y. First, we use questions to set and identify our cognitive goals, what it is that is to be found out as the result of successful inquiry. Second, we can use questions to elicit information, not only when w e ask other people questions so as to gain kno wledge from their testimony, but also, presumably, when we ask ourselves ques-

tions in order to recover previously learned information. Thir d, questions play a cr ucial role in the ex ercise of r egulative control over our inquiries—one of the S ocratic roles that H intikka confers on them (H intikka 2007; see also Hintikka 1989’s “interrogative model of inquiry.”) On the one hand, asking people about the legitimacy of their opinions or about the grounds for the information they impar t is a way of assessing their value as testimonial sour ces; on the other hand, success in our inquiries and deliberations, whether individual or collectiv e, can be quickened by asking the right questions, or on the contrar y, be impeded b y asking the wrong questions. There is a fourth respect in which the formulation, the understanding, and the evaluation of questions are epistemologically relevant, namely, in virtue of the role they play in knowledge ascriptions. It is indeed v ery likely that most of our or dinary knowledge ascriptions are not of the some what canonical “‘kno w’ plus declarative that-clause” form, but of other forms, including the “‘kno w’ plus interr ogative whclause” form (i.e. the “ ‘know’ plus indirect question” form, explor ed in the papers by Aloni, Brogaard, and Egré). Given how relevant questions are to epistemology, Hookway proposes to investigate the complexity of our ability, qua epistemic agents, that is, as inquirers, to formulate, understand, and evaluate questions, a problem which, by the way, has interested epistemologists as well as logicians and philosophers of language at least since Hamblin’s seminal article, “Questions” (1958), inaugurated decades of debates between “semantic” and “pragmatic” approaches to questions and the meaning of interrogatives. The standard, semantic appr oach to the logic of questions, dir ectly in the line of Hamblin, relies on the assumption that understanding a question is a matter of kno wing the range of possible answ ers to it. ( Variants of this appr oach are described in B elnap and S teel 1976, H arrah 1984, Higginbotham 1996, Groenendijk and Stokhof 1997.) For Hookway, that approach misses some of the most relevant aspects of the understanding of questions. One such aspect, Hookway argues, is related to the importance of context in determining what counts as a er levant answer to a given question. Here, it is not just the context of utterance that counts, but also the context of inv estigation whose ev olution is mirr ored by the dynamics of the former kind of context. I nquiries and deliberations, Hookway insists, are “extended, structured goal dir ected activities,” so that “ the context of investigation changes rapidly, as possibilities ar e considered, investigated and eliminated, as challenges are raised and responded to.” This requires on our part that we be able to track the changing questions, and subsequently, viii

to track the “shifting range of answers that are relevant to them.” In other words, the notion of a relevant answer is to be approached from a dynamic perspective. But, Hookway notes, relevance of answers is not the final word, for we wouldn’t even bother to engage in an inquiry about a question if the question weren’t in some sense “real” for us. An impor tant part of Hookway’s paper aims at getting a better grip on what makes a question “ real,” a question that will prompt us to try to find an answer, as well as on what makes it reasonable to address such a question. The upshot of Hookway’s reflections on the matter is that understanding a question is, to a gr eat extent, a pragmatic matter, depending on such factors as “the motivations and interests of the person who asked the question; the shifting concerns that result from the development of a conversation, discussion, or inquiry; and the background knowledge of questioner and respondent.” A leitmotiv of Hookway’s epistemological work is that “the focus of our ‘epistemic lives’ is the activity of inquiry: we attempt to find things out, to extend our knowledge by carrying out investigations directed at answering questions, and to r efine our kno wledge by considering questions about things we currently hold to be true.” (Hookway 1990, 211) The point of epistemic evaluation, then, is the control of our inquiries and deliberations, instead of the mere evaluation of our cognitive states as being justified or as constituting knowledge. Issues about warrant and justification, central to orthodox epistemological theorizing, are thus conceived of as subordinated to issues r elated to what H ookway intends to occupy the centr e of the epistemological stage: inquiry. Sceptical challenges, then, can be er defined as “threatening our confidence that we can, indeed, inquire effectively and responsibly,” and not so much as thr eatening the possibility of kno wledge as such. So, it is not only a heterodox conception of knowledge that Hookway defends, but also a heterodox conception of the epistemological project. In “The Fixation of Knowledge and the Question-Answer Process of Inquiry,” Claudine TIERCELIN clearly acknowledges the merits of Hookway’s dynamic and pragmatist approach to knowledge. Yet, she has doubts about the “reality” of the need for depar ting, as Hookway invites us to do, fr om the or thodox epistemological perspectiv e. To make her point, combining lessons drawn fr om her discussion of other pragmatist and pragmatist-affiliated views, mainly Peirce and Wittgenstein, Tiercelin proceeds to outline a picture of knowledge and inquiry which, she thinks, reconciles the cor e pragmatist insights with the spirit of the traditional definition of knowledge as justified true belief. Tiercelin proposes to refine this defi nition b y making kno wledge, qua aim of inquir y, a matter of ix

“basically commonsensical and critical […], warrantedly asser tible […] intellectual and sentimental dispositions and asser tions […] for which the epistemic agent [possibly a community of inquir ers] should be held responsible.” Such a conception, she claims, per fectly compatible with some core pragmatist principles, is likely to shed much light on ho w we ought to think of the possibility of doubt, of the notion of inquir y, and of assertion. The connection between knowledge and the speech act of asser tion is precisely Pascal ENGEL’s main focus in his paper “In What Sense is Knowledge the N orm of Asser tion?” Engel considers the “kno wledge account of assertion,” developed by Slote (1979), Unger (1975), and Williamson (2000). O n Williamson’s v ersion of this account, the only constitutiv e norm of asser tion is that one must asser t that P only if one kno ws that P. To a number of objections to the eff ect that this kno wledge rule for assertion, and mor e generally, “epistemic” norms for asser tion (in terms of warrant, rational credibility, etc.), are either confused or inapplicable in practice, Engel replies that those objections rest on a misunderstanding of the nature of a norm. Those objections are no threat to epistemic accounts of assertion once “what it takes to be the norm of assertion” has been made clear. To object that an epistemic norm for assertion cannot be the norm, or that there can be no norm of assertion at all because otherwise it would too often be violated, or to object that an assertion presumably conforms to other, non-epistemic, norms, is, accor ding to E ngel, to amalgamate two notions of a rule. The knowledge rule, in particular, is meant to be a norm qua constitutive rule for assertion, not qua lexical rule for ‘assertion.’ Cases of assertions that fall short of corresponding knowledge do not, by any means, invalidate the knowledge rule, since the knowledge rule “does not say that it is a defining feature of assertion (a necessary and sufficient condition) that it is go verned by the norm of kno wledge.” On the other hand, Engel introduces a distinction betw een the “statement of a norm” and its “regulation.” The statement of a norm is what captures its objectivity, notably in an imperative form: “One must: perform practice P only if one satisfies feature C.” On the other hand, the regulation of a norm is a subjective matter: the regulation conditions of a norm “are the subjective conditions under which the [statement of a norm is] accessed b y a given individual and [is] implemented in his psychology.” So, while the statement of a norm for a given type of practice does not depend on what the subject believes to be the norm for that type of practice, theegulation r of the norm does depend on the subject’s beliefs about the norm. A pplied to the case x

of assertion, and assuming that kno wledge is the norm of asser tion, that means that a subject needn’t believe that it is indeed the norm of assertion in order to per form an asser tion according to that norm. S he may ev en believe that other norms are in place, or violate the norm, or let the norm be overridden by other candidate norms. But that does not, by any means, allow us to infer that the norm is not in place. E ngel concludes that the charge of confusedness, or inapplicability , against epistemic accounts of assertion, the knowledge account for one, does no harm. It is usually taken for granted that gaining new pieces of kno wledge is the point and pr oper outcome of successful inquir y, and that w e can do so, in a great number of cases, by means of our exercising a deductive capacity. In “Knowledge by Deduction,” Ian RUMFITT focuses on two questions r elated to the issue of kno wledge acquisition b y deduction: How can a subject gain knowledge by exercising her capacity for deductive reasoning? And: H ow can she gain new knowledge by exercising such a capacity? In answer to the fi rst question, Rumfitt endorses an externalist view about kno wledge, according to which one ’s belief that P is kno wledge if it is formed by using a reliable method, one that reliably yields the truth. Whenever a subject is “disposed to deduce a conclusion from some premises only when the conclusion does follow from them, and to recognize at least some of the mor e obvious cases of one statement’s following from others,” the externalist r equirement that the subject ’s belief in the conclusion be formed by a reliable method will be satisfied. To address the second question, Rumfitt opts for what he calls an “exclusionary” conception of a statement’s “logically relevant content,” which he develops from some r emarks b y Ramsey (1927). H e identifi es such content with the possibilities that the statement is understood to exclude, among those that are “live” possibilities in the context in which the declarativ e type-sentence constitutive of the statement is uttered. Rumfitt then defines a statement as tr ue when “ for ev ery possibility that the statement is understood to exclude, something obtains which pr ecludes the obtaining of that possibility.” This allows him to explain how a subject may come to know, by applying her deductive capacity to premises she already knows, a conclusion that she would not hav e come to kno w had she not ex ercised that capacity. When the subject knows the premises, for every “live” possibility that the conclusion is understood to ex clude, she knows something that precludes the obtaining of that possibility. But this is not enough for her to know the conclusion: she still “has to dosome conceptual work in order to see that each possibility ex cluded by the conclusion has alr eady been xi

excluded by the premises.” In this sense, kno wledge of the conclusion is not contained in knowledge of the premises. This view, Rumfitt continues, also explains how various sources of knowledge—perception, testimony, memory, etc.—can, jointly, establish a conclusion that none of them can, individually, establish. Allo wing us to combine deliv erances of diff erent sources of knowledge is precisely what, for R umfitt, makes for the v alue of logic. Based on this consideration, R umfitt concludes that systems of single-conclusion logic have that value, while multiple-conclusion logics don’t. A further epistemologically relevant aspect of inquiry has not so much to do with ho w we can come to kno w and with ho w we talk from what we know, as with how we talk about knowledge. As Jonathan Schaffer, taking inspiration from Hookway, writes, “one of the roles of the knowledge ascription is to keep scor e of the o verall progress of inquiry. We have an epistemic interest in tr uth. Inquiry is our method for seeking tr uth. So we have an epistemic inter est in keeping scor e of the o verall progress in inquiry, and we use our epistemic vocabulary to serve this interest—‘knows’ is an honorific for successful inquirers.” (Schaffer 2004, 84) Accordingly, knowledge ascriptions, and the role of questions in knowledge ascriptions, will be the unifying topic of the next four papers in the v olume. As alluded to above, analytic epistemology has usually been more concerned with kno wledge-that and kno wledge-that ascriptions than with knowledge-wh and knowledge-wh ascriptions. Knowledge-wh ascriptions are constr uctions in which ‘kno w’ takes a wh-clause as a complement. More precisely, a wh-clause is a clause that is intr oduced by a wh-word, like ‘who,’ ‘when,’ ‘where,’ ‘why,’ ‘how,’ and so on. N ow, embedded whclauses can basically be of two kinds: interrogative, and non-interrogative. Among non-interrogative embedded wh-clauses are “free relatives” (FR). (Jacobson 1995 and G rosu 2003 ar e among the main r eferences on the syntax and semantics of FRs.) A FR can always be paraphrased by means of an appropriate determiner phrase (DP), as in: (1) She ate [FR what was left in the cupboard]/[DP the food that was left in the cupboard] or an appropriate preposition phrase (PP), as in: (2) They left [FR when we arrived]/[PP at the time that we arrived]

xii

FRs show striking similarities with embedded wh-clauses of the interrogative kind, especially at the lexical lev el: except for ‘ whether’, all the wh-words that may be contained in a FR seem to be exactly those that may be contained in an embedded wh-interrogative. Examples of embedded interrogative wh-clauses are typically found in propositional attitude ascriptions, as in ‘He knows who came to the party,’ ‘She wonders why he was crying,’ ‘I remember where you have left your keys.’ Most of the papers in this second par t focus on embedded interr ogative wh-clauses, “interrogative complements” for short (as opposed to “declarative complements”, that is, embedded that-clauses), and the relationships those complements bear to propositional attitude verbs, ‘know’ being the pr opositional attitude verb of reference. A puzzling fact about propositional attitude verbs and their admissible complements is that a v erb like ‘know’ takes both declarativ e and interrogative complements, while a v erb like ‘believ e’ takes only declarativ e complements and a v erb like ‘ wonder’ takes only interr ogative complements. This is the core observation that Paul EGRÉ, in “Question-Embedding and Factivity,” sets out to inv estigate, by focusing on the behaviour of those v erbs with r espect to the embedding of whether-clauses. After discussing a number of candidate semantic as w ell as pragmatic explanations for that observation, Egré provides evidence for the hypothesis that among all v erbs licensing that-complements, those that ar e “veridical” also license whether-complements, wher e such a v erb is v eridical “if it entails the truth of its complement when used in the positiv e declarative form, namely if it satisfi es the schema Vp o p for all p, where p is a thatclause.” By appealing to this hypothesis in combination with the fur ther hypothesis, borrowed from Groenendijk and Stokhof (1982, 1990), that the extension of an interr ogative complement is a pr oposition (the tr ue answer to the corresponding question), Egré then explains the diff erence between ‘know’ and ‘believ e’ with r espect to question-embedding. Both ‘know’ and ‘believe’ basically take complements of the same semantic type, that-complements, which denote propositions. But because ‘know’, unlike ‘believe,’ is veridical, the denotation of the that-clause after ‘know’ coincides with the extension of the corresponding whether-complement—viz. the pr opositional answ er to the whether-question. This is why , unlike ‘believe,’ ‘kno w’ licenses whether-complements. E gré also explains the difference between ‘know’ and ‘believ e’ on the one hand, and ‘ wonder’ on the other hand. E gré assumes that ‘ wonder’ selects for the intension, as opposed to the extension, of a question, that is,grosso modo, for a set of xiii

propositions, instead of a proposition as in the case of ‘know’ and ‘believe’. For this reason, ‘wonder’ cannot take that-complements. Egré then goes on to assess the v alue of the proposed explanation in light of prima facie disconfirming data about other apparently veridical verbs as well as nonveridical ones. The explanation he proposes for the fact that ‘know’ licenses both thatand whether-complements, leads Egré to say that “to know that is to know whether, just as to know whether is to know that.” This conclusion can be seen as an instance of what Jonathan Schaffer, in “Knowing the Answer” (2007), labels the “ received” or “ reductive vie w” about kno wledge-wh, according to which knowledge-wh, just like knowledge-that, consists in a binary relation Ksp between a subject and a proposition: (3) s knows-wh if and only if Ksp, where p is the tr ue answer to the indirect question Q denoted by the wh-complement. (386) With this vie w can be associated the names of H intikka (1975), Le wis (1982), Boër and Lycan (1986), and more recently Stanley and Williamson (2001), for whom the meaning of (at least) cer tain constructions in terms of ‘know’ can be accounted for reductively in terms of the meaning of knowledge-that ascriptions. Schaffer puts forth an alternative view, the “question-including vie w” of kno wledge-wh, based on the idea that, in any construction in which it may occur , ‘know’ includes an irr educible reference to a question, and that to know is always to know something as an answer to a question. O n this view, knowledge-wh is understood as a ternary, rather than binar y, relation KspQ between a subject, a pr oposition, and a question: (4) s kno ws-wh if and only if KspQ, wher e Q is the indir ect question denoted by the wh-complement, and p the true answer to Q. (392) Because he takes questions to denote sets of contextually relevant alternatives, Schaffer equates the “question-relative” relation KspQ with the “contrast-relative” relation Kspq, “where q is the disjunction of non-p answers to Q.” (393) In particular, to know that p as the true answer to whether p or q is to know that p rather than q. As he intends his analysis to extend to all knowledge ascriptions, Schaffer’s question-including view is another name for what he calls the “contrastivist” view, or “contrastivism.” According to xiv

contrastivism, ‘know’ always denotes the ternar y relation Kspq, where p stands for a proposition and q for a contrast proposition. In the particular case of apparently binary knowledge ascriptions of the form ‘S knows that P ’, the v alue of the contrast v ariable is contextually pr ovided. This view, supposedly inspired by Dretske (1970) and found in other forms in Morton and Karjalainen (2003) and in S innott-Armstrong (2004), inter alia, is defended b y Schaff er in “From Contextualism to Contrastivism” (2004) and “Contrastive Knowledge” (2005). In his paper “Cheap Knowledge and Easy Questions,” Martin MONTMINY examines Schaff er’s contrastivist vie w and objects to it on the ground that it is unable to fully account for ordinary speakers’ judgments about kno wledge claims made in v arious contexts. O n the one hand, Montminy argues, some knowledge claims that are intuitively false given the context in which they ar e made turn out tr ue on Schaff er’s account. On the other hand, M ontminy continues, some kno wledge claims that are intuitively true given the context in which they are made are predicted to be false by Schaffer’s view. In particular, to make his point, Montminy considers knowledge of the denial of both moderate and radical sceptical hypotheses, and argues that in some “lo w standards” contexts, one can truthfully assert ‘I know that non-SH’—for SH a sceptical hypothesis—, whereas such a sentence would always be predicted to be false by Schaffer’s view. Montminy goes on to argue that when it comes to accounting for our intuitions about knowledge claims, another version of epistemological contextualism is likely to fare better than Schaffer’s contrastivist view. Epistemological contextualism is the view, championed by Cohen (1990), DeRose (1995), and Lewis (1996), according to which knowledge claims depend for their truth on the context in which they are made. “Epistemic pluralism,” the v ersion of contextualism fav oured by Montminy, allows the standards of justification to vary with the contexts in which knowledge claims are made: in a “lo w standards” context, the standards of justifi cation that are in place are “externalist,” which makes it truthful to assert ‘I know that non- SH’; on the contrar y, in a context wher e “high”, that is, “internalist” standards of justification are in place, the sentence cannot be truthfully asserted. According to Montminy, such a view is what is needed to do justice to ordinary speakers’ judgments about knowledge claims. Back to kno wledge-wh ascriptions, B erit BROGAARD, in “Knowledge-The and Propositional Attitude Ascriptions,” proposes to take a closer look at the semantics of the interrogative complements of ‘know.’ Earlier, a distinction between two kinds of wh-clauses was mentioned, that between xv

free relatives and wh-interrogatives. Brogaard’s suggestion is that all embedded wh-clauses, whether they are interrogative or consist of free relatives, be given the same uniform semantic tr eatment as pr edicates. Thus, for example, ‘when we arrived’ shall be tr eated as denoting the pr operty of being a time at which the people er ferred to by ‘we’ arrived; ‘who attended the lecture’ as denoting the property of being a person who attended the lecture in question. And this is supposed to be so whether the wh-clause is a wh-interrogative or a FR. (For another recent attempt, based on crosslinguistic evidence, at unifying the semantic treatment of wh-clauses, see Caponigro 2004; see also Caponigro and Heller 2007.) The possibility of accounting for wh-clauses as pr edicates allows Brogaard to pr opose the following truth-conditional analysis for knowledge-wh ascriptions: (5) ‘S knows wh-F ’ is true if and only if, for some x, S knows that x is wh-F. where, presumably, the range of x depends on thewh-word (persons in the case of ‘who’, ways in the case of ‘ho w’, locations in the case of ‘ where’, etc.). Brogaard extends this analysis to another type of knowledge ascription. In some such ascriptions, ‘kno w’ takes a defi nite or indefinite DP complement: ‘ S knows the F ’, ‘ S knows an F ’. In some cases, the DP in constr uctions of this form can be r eplaced b y a tr uth-conditionally equivalent wh-clause, as in: (6) Jessica knows [the capital ofVermont]/[what the capital ofVermont is]. When a paraphrase of this sort is available, the DP can be thought of as a “concealed question” (CQ), that expressed by the appropriate wh-clause. This being so, Brogaard proposes to apply an analysis analogous to (5) to ‘know-CQ’ constructions: (7) ‘S knows an/the F ’ is true iff for some x, S knows that x is an/the F. Maria ALONI offers a very different approach to the phenomenon of concealed questions, to which she dedicates her paper, “Concealed Questions Under Cover.” She focuses on the obser vation, initially made b y Heim (1979), that a knowledge-CQ ascription such as: xvi

(8)

John knows the capital that Fred knows.

is ambiguous between the following two readings: (9) John knows the same capital that Fred knows. (10) John knows what capital Fred knows. The pr oblem is to fi nd a suitable r epresentation of the ambiguity . I n order to solve it, Aloni assumes, like Egré in his paper, that ‘know’ always selects for a pr oposition. I n par ticular, when it takes an interr ogative complement, ‘know’ selects for the proposition that is the complete tr ue answer to the question. B ut a DP like that in (8), viz. ‘ the capital that Fred knows,’ is presumably an expression that denotes an individual entity, not a proposition. So, Aloni argues, there would be a mismatch between the semantic type of the complements licensed b y ‘know’ and the type of a DP like that in (8), if a type-shifting r ule didn’t enter the picture at that place, turning expr essions denoting individual entities into identity questions appropriate to those expr essions. So, for instance, if the DP is ‘the capital that Fred knows,’ the type-shifting rule applies and yields the question ‘What is the x such that x is identical with the capital that F red knows?’ This explains how (8) can be read as in (10), which can be paraphrased as saying that J ohn knows the answ er to the question ‘ What is the capital that Fred knows?’ Suppose Fred knows the capital of Italy. On this reading the sentence entails that J ohn knows that Fred knows what the capital of Italy is, but John himself need not know what the capital of Italy is. To explain this meaning Aloni assumes that an identity question is always interpr eted with r espect to a contextually selected “ conceptual cover.” A conceptual cover is a set of individual concepts, the idea being that each individual in the domain of discourse is identifi ed b y means of one and only one concept (in each world). Conceptual covers being allowed to v ary with the conv ersational circumstance, our ev aluation of the relevant fragment of discourse, in particular what counts as an answer to a wh-question like that r esulting fr om type-shifting a DP , will v ary accordingly. Putting conceptual covers to use, Aloni can then explain how (8) gets its two r eadings, as (10) can no w be paraphrased as saying that John knows (under one conceptual perspective) what capital Fred knows (under another conceptual perspective), and (9) can now be paraphrased as saying that ther e is a unique capital that F red knows and John knows it too under the same conceptual perspective as Fred. xvii

Of all constructions in terms of ‘know,’ those of the form S‘ knows how to F’ are of the most impor tant philosophically speaking, due to G ilbert Ryle’s (1949)denunciation of the prejudice in favour of knowledge-that and his subsequent insistence on the necessity of making kno wledge-how a kind of knowledge distinct from, and irreducible to a kind of knowledge-that. It has become standard practice to call “intellectualists” those who defend the reducibility of kno wledge-how to kno wledge-that, and to call “ antiintellectualists” those who deny that knowledge-how can be reduced to a kind of knowledge-that (disregarding the variety of intermediary positions that may be endorsed on the matter). (For a recent survey of the literature on knowledge-that and knowledge-how, see Fantl 2008.) A consequence of the aforementioned account of knowledge-wh by Brogaard is that she seems to be siding with the intellectualists. Indeed, arguing that ‘how’ is, semantically speaking, just a wh-word, Brogaard extends her analysis of knowledge-wh in (5) to the special case of knowledge-how: (11) ‘S knows how to F’ is tr ue if and only if , for some w, S knows that w is how to F. That is: knows that w is a way in which she mayF, or: knows that w is a way in which one may F, depending on whether ‘know how to F’ is interpreted as entailing the possession b y S of an ability to F—an “ability-entailing” reading—or not—an “ability-neutral” reading. In this respect, Brogaard’s account presents striking similarities with the str ong intellectualist position endorsed b y Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson in their justly famous paper “Knowing How” (2001), which can certainly be praised for having recently revived the interest of analytic philosophers in the issue of knowledge-how and knowledge-that. The next three papers in the collection can be considered as challenges and/or alternatives to the reductivist or intellectualist view on knowledge-how. Focusing on the v ersion of intellectualism defended b y Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson, Daniele SGARAVATTI and Elia ZARDINI present a number of criticisms intended to undermine some of tanley S and Williamson’s main arguments and assumptions. Sgarav atti and Zardini’s first objection is that S tanley and Williamson’s version of (11) will yield intuitively incorrect truth-conditions for ‘ S knows how to F ’ when the obvious answer to the question ‘How to F?’ is ‘There is no way to F.’ Their second objection is that ther e are cer tain logical r elations under which knowledge-how seems to be closed, but under which their knowledge-that xviii

counterparts appear not to be closed, especially when the relevant knowledge has “singular content,” that is, when it is dir ectly about a particular object. Their third objection rests on the conjecture that if knowledge-how were just a kind of knowledge-wh, and ultimately of knowledge-that, we should expect that pieces of kno wledge-how could be used as gr ounds for acquiring fur ther pieces of kno wledge-that by inference, just as w ell as obvious pieces of kno wledge-that and kno wledge-wh can be used to that eff ect. Unfortunately, Sgaravatti and Zardini argue, knowledge-how shows important dissimilarities with knowledge-wh and knowledge-that in that respect. Stanley and Williamson (and Brogaard in a similar fashion) assume as an intermediar y step in their argument for the r educibility of knowledge-how to knowledge-that, that knowledge-wh in general is reducible to knowledge-that. Sgaravatti and Zardini’s fourth and final objection is that Stanley and Williamson’s analysis of knowledge-wh ascriptions, in the vicinity of Brogaard’s analysis in (5), cannot fully deal with the availability of comparative knowledge-wh ascriptions (such as ‘Hannah knows how to ride a bicycle better than Mary does’) as opposed to the apparent unavailability of comparative knowledge-that ascriptions. Although they do not intend to pr ovide a positiv e account of kno wledge-how, a recurrent concern in Sgaravatti and Zardini’s paper has to do with the diffi culties faced b y the intellectualist when it comes to dealing with the apparent ability-like character of the knowledge ascribed by using ‘know how’ in some cases. I ndeed, a linguistic “ fact” about kno wledgehow ascriptions, already alluded to abo ve, is that in some cases, they will be giv en an ability-entailing r eading, while in other cases, they will be given an ability-neutral reading. In “Knowledge-How and Ability,” Franck LIHOREAU proposes to appr oach that fact, and the issue of kno wledge-how and ability mor e generally speaking, fr om an epistemological perspective, by focusing on the kinds of kno wledge and of ability that we may talk about when w e talk about kno wing how to do something. H e distinguishes two kinds of kno wledge of how to do something, a “ practical” and a “theoretical”, as well as two kinds of ability to do something, an “intrinsic” and an “ extrinsic”, and defi nes one’s “practical” knowledge of how to F as one’s acquired intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, ability to F, and one’s “theoretical” knowledge of how to F as one’s knowledge of, or about, how something that has the acquired intrinsic ability to F does F. Lihoreau intends to explain the aforementioned linguistic fact about knowledge-how ascriptions by putting to use that double epistemological distinction, and by saying that the schema ‘S knows how to F only if S is able to F’ is true xix

when ‘knowing how’ is intended to r efer to kno wledge of the practical kind and ‘being able’ to refer to an ability of the intrinsic kind. Lihor eau further argues that a number of theor etical benefits are to be gained from endorsing the resulting view about knowledge-how and ability, regarding issues related to the connection betw een knowledge-how and intentional action, to comparative attributions of knowledge-how and ability, the Gettierability of kno wledge-how, the opacity of kno wledge-how ascriptions, and possible counter examples to the vie w that to kno w how is to hav e an ability. Building from previous work of his (see Hetherington 2006), Stephen HETHERINGTON recommends an ev en more radical, albeit subtle, treatment of the intellectualist thr eat, as he goes so far as inviting us to consider knowing-that as a kind of knowing-how, conceived in turn as an ability. In his contribution to the volume, “Knowing-That, Knowing-How, and Knowing Philosophically,” Hetherington’s purpose is to elucidate parts of what makes for the complexity of that ability. He suggests that we turn from what he calls the “standard conception of knowing,” that is, the conception that to know that P is to be in a “state” of knowing that P (where the state in question is typically understood as one of believing thatP cum further appropriate properties that make it properly epistemic), to the more dynamic view on which knowing that P can be equally identified with any member of what Hetherington calls P’s “epistemic diaspora,” a grouping of cognitive phenomena related to P, such as believing accurately that P, asserting accurately that P, accurately providing evidence as to P, etc. A consequence is that one can know that P by being the subject of some of the P-related cognitive phenomena ev en if one is not the subject of any other P-related phenomena. None of the P-related phenomena deser ves the name ‘knowing that P’ more than the others members of the diaspora. What unifies P’s epistemic diaspora is the ability to generate the expr ession or manifestation of any of the members of the diaspora. As a special case, the ability to accurately question whether or about P will often, but not always, be part of P’s epistemic diaspora. But according to Hetherington, when it comes to philosophical knowledge, that ability becomes essential, as he suggests that philosophical kno wledge that P be considered a kind of know-how, that which consists for a large par t in the ability to pose philosophical questions about P and still to fi nd such questions ev en in philosophical answers to them. By developing these considerations and by reflecting upon the complex aspects of philosophical ability , Hetherington invites us to a tr ue reversal of the epistemological perspectiv e, and to a xx

rethinking of the natur e and structure of knowing, and of philosophical knowledge and inquiry. It is y et another, diff erent kind of r eversal of the epistemological perspective that Duncan PRITCHARD calls for in the paper that closes this volume, “Knowing the Answer, Understanding, and Epistemic Value.” The main problem that Pritchard addresses is the “problem of epistemic value.” (See Pritchard 2007 for a survey of the literature on the topic.) An underlying assumption of the whole epistemological enterprise, as traditionally conceived, is that knowledge is distinctively valuable, in that it is, as such, not only worthy of scrutiny, but more worthy of scrutiny than “that which falls short of knowledge not just as a matter of degr ee but as a matter of kind.” The assumption, Pritchard argues, is erroneous. The only plausible account available of why kno wledge should be of distinctiv e value in the foregoing sense is unsatisfactor y. The account in question, understood in standard virtue-theoretic terms, explains that kno wledge deserves of fi nal value because it is a “ cognitive achievement,” mainly a cognitiv e success achieved b y the ex ercise of one ’s cognitiv e ability. Pritchard objects to this account that kno wledge can be found without accompanying cognitive achievement in the pr oper sense, and on the other hand, cognitiv e achievement can be found without accompanying knowledge. To put things roughly, a cognitive achievement, in the pr oper sense, cannot be lost just because of the pr esence of what P ritchard calls “environmental epistemic luck,” which he distinguishes fr om Gettier-style epistemic luck. O n the contrary, knowledge can be lost for that v ery reason. Not so with understanding, which Pritchard regards as irreducible to mere knowing-why, and beyond this, to any form of knowing-that. Understanding is that which is distinctively valuable epistemologically speaking, and it is so because it is understanding, not knowledge, that is the relevant cognitive achievement. In light of this thesis, Pritchard goes on to reassess the relevance of inquiry to the problem of epistemic v alue. If inquiry might be thought to be r elevant to the problem of epistemic value, it is, Pritchard contends, because the product of successful inquiry, individual as well as collaborative, is not knowledge, but understanding. Acknowledgements Six out of the twelve contributions to the present volume originate from papers presented at the international wor kshop “Knowledge and Q uesxxi

tions” held at the Ar chives Henri Poincaré in N ancy, France, on M arch the 15 th and 16 th, 2007. Thanks to Gerhard Heinzmann, then the H ead of the Archives, for the unconditional trust he put in me when it came to organising the workshop. The workshop was financially supported by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Nancy-Université, the Conseil Général de M eurthe-et-Moselle, and the Communauté Urbaine du G rand Nancy. Financial assistance was also provided by the Department of Philosophy of the Université Nancy 2. The rest of the authors, contacted after the workshop had taken place, all accepted straight away to contribute a paper to the volume. I thank them a lot for that. I would like to thank Grazer P hilosophische Studien and its editors, in particular the managing editor , Maria E. R eicher, for publishing this special issue on kno wledge and questions. M any thanks too to M artina Fürst, Thomas Binder, as well as to a number of anonymous referees from the Grazer team, for their professionalism and efficiency, and for contributing to making the pr eparation of this v olume a much less worrisome experience for me. Finally, above all, and again, I would like all the authors to know how grateful I am that they so kindly, generously, and enthusiastically accepted to be part of the project.

REFERENCES Belnap, N. and T. Steel. 1976. The Logic of Questions and Answers, Yale University Press, New Haven. Boer, S. E. and W. Lycan. 1986. Knowing Who, Bradford, Cambridge. Caponigro, I. 2004. “The Semantic Contribution of Wh-words and Type Shifts: Evidence from Free Relatives Crosslinguistically,” in Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theor y (SALT) XIV, (Ed.) R. B. Young, 38–55, CLC Publications, Ithaca. Caponigro, I. and D. Heller. 2007. “The Non Concealed Nature of Free Relatives: Implications for Connectivity C rosslinguistically”, in Direct Compositionality, (Eds.) C. Barker and P. Jacobson, 237–263, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Castañeda, H. N. 1980. “The Theory of Q uestions, Epistemic Powers, and the Indexical Theory of Knowledge,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume V: Studies in E pistemology, (Eds.) P. French et al., 193–237, U niversity of M innesota Press, Minneapolis. xxii

Cohen, S. 1990. “Scepticism and Kno wledge Attributions,” in Doubting: Contemporary Perspectives on Scepticism, (Eds.) M. Roth and G. Ross, Dordrecht: Kluwer. Craig, E. 1990 Knowledge and the State of Nature : An Essay in Conceptual Synthesis, Clarendon Press, Oxford. DeRose, K. 1995. “Solving the Skeptical Problem”, The Philosophical Review 104, 1–52. Dretske, F. I. 1970. “Epistemic Operators,” The Journal of Philosophy 67, 1007– 1023. Fantl, J. 2008. “Knowing-How and Knowing-That, ” Philosophy Compass 3, 451– 470. Groenendijk, J. and M. Stokhof. 1982. “Semantic Analysis of Wh-Complements,” Linguistics and Philosophy 5, 117–233. — 1997. “Questions,” in Handbook of Logic and Language, (Eds.) van Benthem, J. and A. ter Meulen, 1055–1124, Elsevier, Amsterdam. Grosu, A. 2003. “A Unified Theory of ‘Standard’ and ‘Transparent’ Free Relatives,” Natural Language and Linguistic Theor y 21, 247–331. Hamblin, C. 1958. “Questions,” The Australasian Journal of Philosophy 36, 159– 168. Harrah, D. 1984. “The Logic of Q uestions,” in Handbook of Philosophical Logic II, (Eds.) Gabbay, D. and F. Guenther, 715–764, Reidel, Dordrecht. Heim, I. 1979. “Concealed Questions,” in Semantics from Different Points of View, (Eds.) R. Bauerle, U. Egli, and A. von Stechow, Springer, Berlin. Hetherington, S. 2006. “H ow to Kno w (That Knowledge-That is KnowledgeHow),” in Epistemology Futures, (E d.) S. H etherington, 71–94, Clar endon Press, Oxford. Higginbotham, J. 1996. “The Semantics of Questions,” in Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theor y, (Ed.) S. Lappin, Blackwell, Oxford. Hintikka, J. 1975. “Different Constructions in Terms of the Basic Epistemological Verbs: A Survey of Some Problems and Proposals,” in The Intensions of Intentionality and Other New Models for Modalities, Reidel, Dordrecht. — 1989. “Knowledge Representation and the I nterrogative Model of I nquiry,” in Knowledge and Scepticism , (Eds.) M. Clay and K. Lehr er, Westview Press, Boulder. — 2007. Socratic Epistemology: Explorations of Knowledge-Seeking by Questioning, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hookway, C. 1990. Scepticism, Routledge, London. Jacobson, P. 1995. “The Q uantificational Force of F ree R elative Clauses”, in Quantifiers in Natural Languages, Vol. II, (Eds.) E. Bach et al, 451-486, Kluwer, Dordrecht.

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Lewis, D. K. 1982. “Whether Report,” in Philosophical Essays Dedicated to Lennart Åqvist on his F iftieth Birthday, (Eds.) T. Pauli et al., 194–206, Filosofiska Studier, Uppsala. Lewis, D. K. 1996. “E lusive Knowledge,” The Australasian Journal of P hilosophy 74, 549–567 Morton, A. and A. Karjalainen 2003. “Contrastiv e Knowledge,” Philosophical Explorations 6, 74–89. Pritchard, D. 2007. “R ecent Work on Epistemic Value,” American Philosophical Quarterly 44, 85–110. Ramsey, F. P. 1927. “Facts and propositions,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volumes 7, 153–70. Ryle, G. 1949. The Concept of Mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Schaffer, J. 2004. “F rom Contextualism to Contrastivism,” Philosophical Studies 119, 73–103. — 2005. “Contrastive Knowledge,” Oxford Studies in Epistemology, Vol. 1, (Eds.) T.S. Gendler and J. Hawthorne, 235-271, Oxford University Press, Oxford. — 2007. “Knowing the Answ er,” Philosophy and P henomenological Research 75, 383–403. Sinnott-Armstrong, W. 2004. Pyrrhonian Skepticism, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Slote M. A. 1979. “Assertion and Belief,” in Papers on Language and Logic , (Ed.) J. Dancy, Keele University Library, Keele. Stanley, J. and T. Williamson 2001. “Kno wing how,” Journal of P hilosophy 98, 411–444. Unger, P. 1975. Ignorance, Oxford University Press, Oxford. White, A. R. 1982. The Nature of Knowledge, Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa. Williamson, T. 2000. Knowledge and its L imits, Oxfor d U niversity P ress, Oxford.

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Grazer Philosophische Studien 77 (2008), 1–21.

QUESTIONS, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND INQUIRIES Christopher HOOKWAY University of Sheffield Summary Questions are relevant to epistemology because they formulate cognitive goals, they ar e used to elicit information, they ar e used in S ocratic r eflection and knowledge sentences often hav e indir ect question complements. The paper explores what capacities we must possess if we are to understand questions and identify and evaluate potential answers to them. The later sections explore different ways in which these matters depend upon pragmatic and other contextual considerations

1. Interrogatives and epistemology This section identifies four diff erent ways in which our ability to use and understand interrogatives has an important role in our practice of epistemic evaluation. In doing this, w e assume that, if w e are to understand our practices of epistemic evaluation, we must recognize that such evaluations normally occur when we participate in activities of inquiry, in attempts to find things out (Hookway 2006, Hintikka 2007). Sceptical challenges can often be understood as thr eatening our confi dence that w e can, indeed, inquire eff ectively and r esponsibly. In that case, w e need to identify the capacities we must possess if such inquiry is to be possible and see the challenges as questioning whether we genuinely possess these capacities. And we best understand concepts such asknowledge and warrant or justification by examining their role in the regulation of inquiries. First, when w e par ticipate in inquir y, w e tr y to fi nd a solution to a problem or an answ er to a question: questions ar e used to identify our cognitive goals. Even if our epistemic aim is to arrive at the truth or knowledge, this has to be understood in the perspectiv e just off ered. Not just any true proposition will satisfy our epistemic aims. I f truth is our aim, then we seek a tr ue proposition that answ ers our question or solv es our

problem. Since questions have this role, we need to understand how our understanding of questions provides us with a clarification of our goal that will enable us to monitor progress towards achieving it. Second, questions are epistemically important because they can be used to elicit information. First, a central (if not the only) way in which we gain knowledge through the testimony of others, is through asking them questions. The search for knowledge through testimony can go wrong because the informant lacks the required information or because she chooses to lie in her reply. Just as important is the possibility that, although the potential informant possesses the information I r equire, my question fails to elicit it. I hav e asked the wr ong question, or asked the right question in the wrong way. It can also go wrong because although my informant offers the information I require, she does so in a way that I cannot absorb or pr ocess. As we shall see below, it is not always transparent what sort of answer the utterance of an interr ogative sentence requires, nor is it always clear just how that information should be pr esented. If we are to understand the capacities we require in order to obtain (and provide) information through this sort of question-answer procedure, we need to take account of these kinds of sensitivity to how information can be elicited and how it can be transmitted. Second, it is not implausible that something similar to what occurs when I learn fr om testimony happens when I r ecover information that I have learned and r emembered. Most of the information stor ed in my memory is not being attended to most of the time. S uccess in inquir y depends upon my being able to attend to it when necessar y—memories should be av ailable for r eflective attention when this is r equired for the regulation of my inquiries. It is a useful idealisation of how this works that I elicit such information thr ough raising a question to which it pr ovides an answer. And, just as in the case of testimony, I can fail to elicit relevant information that I possess by, in effect, asking the wrong question—or by asking the right question in the wrong way. This may reflect the cognitive architecture of our memories: if w e think of memories as stor ed in fi les which are indexed in some way , then it is easy to see that w e could fail to recover that information because our self-dir ected question does not successfully connect with how the information is stored. The third epistemological r ole for questions concerns the ex ercise of regulative control over inquiries (see Hintikka 2007). This Socratic role for questioning also divides into diff erent cases. First, suppose I am ev aluating you as a source of testimony. I shall do this by asking questions: what 2

reason do you have for believing that pr oposition? How reliable are you as a source of testimony on this topic? H ave you taken account of some circumstances which may make you unreliable? And so on: I evaluate your value as a source of testimony by interrogating you about the legitimacy of your opinions. Second, such questioning has an important role in activities such as discussion in the course of cooperative attempts to solve problems. When engaged in discussions, w e question the pr oposals, opinions and arguments of other participants, recognizing this was the way to regulate joint inquiry and ensure that it conforms to defensible standards. Mutual questioning is a way of testing our diff erent contributions to the discussion, and this is necessary as a means of improving our chances of success in our inquiries. And thir d, this can occur without any one else being involved. I r egulate my o wn inquiries and deliberations b y asking questions about them: I wonder whether I should check how reliable evidence is, I consider whether I should be mor e careful in double checking my reasoning, I ask myself whether ther e are defeating considerations that I have ignored or whether I’ m right to tr eat some item of information as providing a potential defeater , and so on. R eflective inquiry—whether individual or cooperativ e—depends for its success upon our asking the right questions about its pr ogress. Asking the wr ong reflective questions can impede progress1. Once we take account of these phenomena, w e can recognize another capacity that is required if we are to carry out inquiries effectively. We need to be able to recognize when it is rational to raise particular reflective questions, when we have a reasons to ask them. Of course, there are interesting questions about what makes it rational to adopt a par ticular cognitiv e aim; we can investigate what makes a question or pr oblem interesting or important. But the solutions to such pr oblems may often be external to our practices of distinctively epistemic evaluation, which are concerned with how we can achieve the epistemic goals that w e happen to have. We can have all sorts of reasons for being interested in questions. In the cases I am concerned with here, identifying reasons for raising questions is internal to an on-going activity of inquiry. It is rational to ask these questions because it is epistemically appropriate to do so at this stage in the inquir y we are concerned with. Doing so will sometimes elicit information w e need, or it may lend salience to considerations that w e need to attend to if our 1. One suggestive move in this direction is found in the work of Charles S. Peirce who argues that the conclusion of an abductive inference is usually an interrogative: the inference establishes that the question arises, that it should be answered (see Hookway 2005).

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inquiry is to prosper. We can be eff ective inquirers only if we know how to establish when it is rational to ask subordinate questions as the inquiry develops. We need to be sensitiv e to reasons for raising questions as w ell as to reasons for belief and doubt. The fourth reason for taking questions seriously in epistemology is not a matter of what we have to do in carrying out inquiries. It concerns the logical grammar of sentences about knowledge. It is commonly assumed that knowledge sentences ar e of a similar form to belief sentences: both express propositional attitudes, perhaps concerning a r elation between a subject and a pr oposition. One obvious reason for questioning the existence of this parallel between the grammar of belief and of knowledge rests on the observation that the word ‘knows’, unlike the word ‘believes’ can take an indirect question complement. As well as sentences such as: John knows that 71 is a prime number. There are also knowledge sentences such as: John knows when the next train will leave. John knows how the internal combustion engine works. Johns knows why water expands on freezing. It is an attractive idea that the indirect question form is the fundamental one. We can always fi nd an equiv alent way of expr essing what a pr opositional knowledge sentence expresses by using just the indirect question form. Our example above is equivalent to: 71 is prime and John knows whether 71 is prime. It is a far mor e controversial matter whether the indir ect question forms listed above can be paraphrased into statements of pr opositional knowledge. It is easy to see ho w to paraphrase ‘kno wledge whether’ locutions. If I kno w whether it is raining then I either kno w that it is raining or I know that it is not raining (see H ookway 1990). B ut once w e consider cases involving idioms like ‘knows why’, ‘knows where’, and ‘knows who’ (among others) it is v ery diffi cult to see ho w a r eduction to the ‘kno ws that’ paradigm can be obtained. I t is thus natural to conclude that if w e abandoned the ‘kno ws that’ locution, our expr essive powers would not be diminished, although we may have to use more cumbersome locutions 4

than we are accustomed to. But if we were to abandon the locutions involving ‘knows’ with an indirect question complement, our expressive powers would be seriously impair ed. Even if that w ere disputed, it is plausible that the indir ect question kno wledge sentences ar e the most impor tant and most widely used. I n that case, w e should begin our study of the importance of the concept of knowledge by focusing on the indirect question ‘knowledge’ sentences and, indeed, to tr eat knowledge as a r elation between a subject and a question. A subject possesses kno wledge when she possesses the answer to or ‘a correct answer to’ some question. Either way, as has been noted for some time, it is a r easonable conjecture that considering how and why we use these indirect question idioms should be a source of insight into how we should understand knowledge. (Williams 1973, Hookway 1990, 1995, Schaffer 2007) Whether knowledge sentences taking an indirect question complement are the fundamental ones or not, it is clear that the study of questions and their answers should contribute to our understanding of at least some of the sentences w e use to expr ess and describe states of knowledge. The first three considerations bring out ways in which the understanding and evaluation of questions is fundamental to the ways in which w e evaluate inquiries and deliberations. The role of questions in kno wledge sentences does not ob viously have this character. However the fact that questions have these two sorts of roles may provide a clue to how we use the concept of knowledge to make evaluations. The facts about knowledge sentences suggest that kno wledge is a r elation betw een an agent and a question which can be understood by exploring what counts as being in a satisfactory relation to a question when it is being deployed in one of the other three fashions. Perhaps I know some propositions when I have successfully completed an inquiry into it or would have no epistemic reason to carry out such an inquir y. Alternatively, exploiting the eliciting use of questions, perhaps w e have knowledge concerning some question when we can provide an accurate answer to it. Or thirdly, if we take note of the fact that questions hav e a S ocratic role in the r egulation of inquir y, we might suppose that knowledge with respect to a question requires that we can provide an answer to it that will not succumb in the face of fur ther questioning. Our explanation of knowledge may refer to the different uses that questions have in epistemic evaluation. So: what capacities must w e possess if w e are to use interr ogatives in epistemology in the ways described. Among these capacities must be an ability to recognize whether something is an answ er to a given question. 5

Another concerns when we understand a question well enough to be able to ask it and tr y to answ er it. S ection 2 identifi es some complexities in our understanding of questions by considering how we understand ‘who’ questions. Section 3 emphases the importance of the concept of a ‘relevant answer’ to a question and considers some of the capacities w e must possess in order to identify relevant answers. It will be a consequence of these discussions that the question/answer relation is more a matter of pragmatics than semantics and section 4, which considers the cir cumstances under which a question is ‘real’, develops some implications of this. 2. Two kinds of who-questions Much work on the logic of questions has made the assumption that understanding a question inv olves grasping the range of possible answ ers that it has. Indeed some theorists hav e wanted to identify questions with the set of their answers (Harrah 1984). And early work often concentrated on sentences that have a sort of quantificational structure (Belnap and Steel, Bromberger 1992). It is suggested that the interr ogative ‘When will you arrive home?’ contains the open sentence ‘You will arrive home at x’. The question is then expressed as: (Which x such that x is a time)(You will arrive home at x)? Then any sentence obtained b y replacing the variable in ‘ You will arrive home at x’ by an expression referring to a time will be a possible answ er; and, if the sentence is tr ue, it is the (or a) corr ect answer. Attractive as this approach is, it fails to engage with the most impor tant issues about the understanding of questions. This section will defend this claim, and identify some of the issues we do need to think about, through an examination of ‘who’ questions. Suppose I am the detectiv e who, at the end of my inv estigation, asks everyone who was in the house at the time of the shooting to gather together in the library, I then announce that I know which of the people waiting nervously in the library is the killer. And one of them asks me: So which of the people gathered here committed the crime? We can think of this as a ‘ Which-of-these-people’ question. A question of this form does fit the quantificational pattern:

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(Which x such that x is a person in this room)(x killed the Colonel)? The question is sound so long as one of the people pr esent is the villain. And a correct answer to that question will identify which of those people it is.2 In giving my answer, I can pick this person out in any of a number of ways. I might identify them as the butler , as Jones, as the man sitting in the chair by the door, as ‘That man’—pointing at Jones—, as the only person who had served with the victim in the army, and so on. So long as all of these responses pick out the same person, it is best to see them all as different ways of giving the same answer. Although these are all different versions of the same answer, it does not follow that they are equally good. If no one but myself is aware that the villain served with the Colonel during the war, an answer that picks him out through this characteristic is correct but useless to those who ar e waiting for my r esponse. Indeed, my selection of one way of giving my answer in preference to others will normally implicate that the chosen one will be particularly salient for the audience. It is easy to imagine circumstances in which the audience is misinformed about the characteristics of their fellows and my correct answer sends most of them off in the wr ong direction. A good pr esentation of the corr ect answer should enable the audience to pick the mur derer out fr om their fellows themselves, a poor presentation of that answer may not give them this ability. If the answer is presented well, then the audience will kno w which of these people the murderer is. If it is presented poorly, then I am currently very unsure whether they would.We can easily see how someone else could learn who the murderer was from his or her testimony, so long as that person has appropriate background knowledge. What is important here is, first, that the structure of the question gives clear sense to what would count as a correct answer: it is an answ er that uniquely picks out the member of the universe of interrogative quantification who satisfi es the attributive presupposition of the question. S econd there can be a v ariety of ways of pr esenting the same answ er. This gives rise to pragmatic issues: some ways of presenting the answer will meet the questioner’s needs and others may not. And some may meet these needs better than others. Thus responding to attempts to elicit information b y trying to answ er questions of this sor t requires us to hav e the ability to 2. Such questions raise a host of interesting issues. Suppose my answer was: ‘The person who killed the Colonel killed the Colonel’. Is that an answer that is correct but useless? Or is it not even a correct answer because it is empty: unless my questioner already knows the answer to the question, he will not be able to make anything of the answ er. I shall not settle this issue here.

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identify which answer is correct and to identify which way of pr esenting that answer will be appr opriate. We need to take account of what information the questioner already possesses, and also what they propose to do with the information that they obtain from me. Similar points hold if we think of the question as setting the aim of an inquiry rather than being used to elicit information. Suppose that, in my role as detective, I gaze at the assembled people and ask myself: which of these people killed the colonel? I reflect on the evidence I possess and try to work out which of them it is. O nce again, some ways of formulating the correct answer will not satisfy me: perhaps I need a formulation that will enable me to place my hand on the killer’s shoulder and read him his rights and some answers will not put me into this kind of demonstrativ e contact with him. In other circumstances I may just need a name, and I can then trust my colleagues to pick him out when he tries to boar d a plane. It is often assumed that who-questions work in the same way as whichof-these-people questions: correct answers must always succeed in picking out some member of a univ erse of discourse. I t is easy to see that this is not true. Suppose that we hear the doorbell ring and, after I return from answering it, you ask me who was at the door. In many cases, my answer will not succeed in picking out a unique individual y et will not be an evasion of the question. I may tell y ou that it is a J ehovah’s witness, that it is one of the children from next door, that it was a postman, that it was someone asking for directions and so on. The characterisation I offer is an indefinite one, but is exactly what is required. Other examples are: Who is Peter? Peter is a bricklayer. (Belnap 1982, 195) Who is Tully? A Roman statesman and orator. (Stampe 1974, 168–9) Denis Stampe calls such questions ‘ predicate-wanting’, and he follo ws Belnap in thinking that ther e is a syntactic ambiguity in who-questions, even if it is not evident from surface grammar. Some are predicate-wanting questions and others more closely resemble the which-of-these-people questions that we discussed above. Another possibility is that a ‘who’-question always requires a characterisation of the person at issue, and that pragmatic contextual factors determine what sort of characterisation is required: do we need one that uniquely picks out the person in question? O r do we need one that provides an attribute of the person?We do not need to resolve this issue of ambiguity here. The important point is that the predicate-wanting cases raise some issues that are interesting for epistemology. 8

As before, the same answer can be presented in different ways and the way in which we should present it depends upon which is more likely to enable the questioner to grasp the answer. I might describe some Roman politician as a friend of Tully’s, or I might describe him as a friend of Cicero’s. In either case, I ascribe a pr operty to him. M any would hold that, in each case, I ascribe the same property to him, in which case I give the same answer to the question. B ut it is easy to see that someone who was ignorant of the fact that Cicero was Tully may find one of these ways of presenting the answer much more useful than the other. However this example is less decisive than the earlier ones. This is because the criteria for same person are much clearer (at least in practice) than those forsame property. It is easy to see that some might dispute that, in the case described, the answers are the same and the properties they ascribe are the same. Indeed, identity of answers may often be an indeterminate matter. If I tell you that Peter works on a building site, is this a diff erent answer from the one in Belnap’s example or a less precise way of giving the same answer? Suppose we adapt Stampe’s example so the answer claims that Tully was a Roman politician and speechmaker, there may be room for dispute about whether that is the same answer (differently presented) or a different answer. In our which-of-these-people question, the range of possible correct answers was carefully circumscribed within the question: in answering the question, we can pick out anyone, so long as they possess the property of being in that room at that time. With a predicate-wanting question, the question itself gives very little guidance about what sorts of predicate can be used, about what sorts of pr operties and characteristics can be picked out in giving our answer. There may be no clear way of identifying whether something is an answ er to the question—or whether it is an answ er that is wor th taking seriously. Why should I tell you that Peter is a builder, rather than that he is a father of two, a M anchester United supporter, a keen cyclist, a Jehovah’s witness …? The list of candidates is potentially endless. I t seems to be possible to find circumstances in which each possibility would be a r elevant answ er and others wher e it appears not to be an answ er at all. These examples enable us to identify some different ways in which our understanding of a question is influenced by context. These differences are reflected in the capacities we must possess if we are to raise and respond to questions in inquiry. First, if I ask ‘Which of these people committed the crime?’, the range of possible answers depends upon who t‘hese people’ are, and this will vary from case to case. Familiar kinds of context-relativity in 9

the use of indexicals, demonstratives, vague words, etc., can all infl uence the set of possible answers associated with such a question. Second, once we have determined the range of possible answers in a case like this, there are further questions about how, in context, a particular answer should be expressed. Effective eliciting of information and inquiry will be hindered if w e lack the capacity to identify ho w answ ers should be formulated. But, third, who-questions (especially pr edicate-wanting ones) intr oduce a further level of context relativity. In these cases, we need the concept of a relevant answer: the question seeks information about someone, and the conversational context determines what sor t of information is r equired. Answers must provide salient information, and such salience is a function of the state of the conv ersation or inquiry. It is not just a matter of ho w the answer should be expressed; it is a matter of what counts as a serious answer to the question at all. Most interesting questions have this character: a why-question typically requires a salient or important cause or explanatory factor; a how question demands a relevantly important feature of how something happened. One source of clues concerning the r ole of context in guiding the use of interrogatives is provided by recent work in pragmatics on the nature of focus. A word or phrase is the focus of an utterance when it is given a sort of pitch accent, something that lends it prominence within the intonation contour of the utterance (G lanzberg 2005, 75). Consider the diff erence between the following two utterances: JOHN likes Jane John likes JANE It is natural to see the former as an answ er to the question ‘ Who likes Jane? ’ and as eliminating alternativ e statements to the eff ect that some other person likes Jane; and the latter may answers ‘Who does John like?’ and it rules out propositions to the eff ect that he likes people other than Jane. It is often suggested that when a wor d or phrase is focussed within an utterance, this introduces a range of alternative propositions with which it is being contrasted. The verb might also be focussed: ‘John LIKES Jane’ may rule out the possibility that John loves Jane, or regards her with contempt, and so on. This has a bearing on issues about when questions can legitimately be raised during discussion and inquir y: generally, questions intended to challenge a claim will hav e a diff erent target accor ding to which part of the claim is focussed. The observation that John was v ery 10

friendly towards Mary, for example, might challenge ‘J ohn likes JANE’ but not challenge either of the others. These patterns of pitch accent in an utterance r elate to our inter ests in the r ole of questions in sev eral ways. First, the focus of an utterances provides evidence of the questions (explicit or implicit) to which it is an answer. In the cases discussed abo ve, assertions are evaluated as answ ers to the questions ‘ Who likes Jane?’, ‘Who does John like?’, and ‘ What is John’s attitude to wards Jane? ’, respectively. Indeed theorists often insist that focus helps determine ‘question-answer congruence’. If we are asked ‘Who does John like?’, then ‘JOHN likes Jane’ is not a felicitous answer, while ‘John likes JANE’ is. (G lanzberg 2005, 77). S econdly, the pattern of focus of an utterance and hence the question (implicit or explicit) to which it responds, affects which questions can then be raised as felicitous challenges to the claim. I may challenge the claim that JOHN likes J ane by presenting evidence that J ane has other admirers; and I can challenge the claim that J ohn likes JANE b y suggesting that he likes other people too. We can see this as revealing how the identity of the question to which an assertion is a response can influence the kinds of challenges that can be raised to the asser tion: we challenge the claim as an answ er to a specifi c (implicit or explicit) question; and, in doing this, we often rely upon our sensitivity to the focus or intonation contour of the utterance. Although most discussions of these phenomena concern the ole r of focus in conversation, it is also found when w e try to solve problems through individual inquiries—focus has a place even in silent soliloquy. We can use focus, inter alia, to keep track of the questions curr ently under consideration in the course of an inquiry or deliberation. This helps us to identify some of the capacities we must possess if we are to respond to requests for information framed in questions of diff erent kinds. We must understand the interrogative sentence and thus identify the sort of thing that can serve as a candidate answer. We must draw on background knowledge and our understanding of the context to determine which answ ers are relevant to the question as posed. H aving ascertained which of these answ ers are correct, we must then work out which of them is the best to off er to the questioner, or to adopt at this stage in our deliberations. And, when an answer can be expressed in different ways, we must be able to determine which formulation is appropriate, given our cognitive projects. One issue, brought to the surface by our remarks on focus, concerns the different ways in which context, including the context provided by the current inquiry, influences our understanding of questions and their answers. 11

3. Relevant answers If asking and answering questions is fundamental to our practice of epistemic evaluation, then we need to ask how we can settle issues about what counts as a r espectable and relevant answer to a question. I f we have no confidence in our ability to do that, w e can hav e no confi dence in our ability to carry out inquiries and deliberations responsibly and effectively. We can now see that our ability to do this—whether in conv ersation or in the course of solitar y inquiry—depends upon our being able to solv e some distinct problems. First, then, ther e is a range of issues concerned with identifying sets of possible answers. The most straightforward way of doing this inv olves identifying a universe of discourse—or, more generally, with picking out a set of objects. When I ask ‘ Which of these people …?’, then I need to settle what counts as ‘these people’. I must determine who is a candidate for being the answ er to the question; whom must I be able to eliminate if I am to identify someone else as my answ er? Related problems about a ‘universe of discourse ’ arise when w e consider ‘where’ questions: if w e answer such a question by identifying a location, then there are questions about how large and appr oximate locations ar e. If you ask me wher e a particular book is, do I answer successfully when I tell you that it is in the library? Or is it required that the location be pinned down to a particular place on a particular shelf ? Questions like ‘predicate-wanting’ ‘who’ questions raise more difficult issues. We need to identify a range of alternatives here, a range of properties or predicates, rather than a range of objects. I n the case we have just considered, there is a sortal which determines what sorts of thing belong in the set of alternatives; with a ‘who’ question, the only constraint is that we are looking for a potential pr operty of a person, for example, which may, but need not, be uniquely individuating. What sort of property or predicate is appropriate is largely determined by contextual and pragmatic considerations.3 ‘Why’ questions ar e more complex still: pr esumably we look for a range of ‘possible explanations’ or something like that. When I 3. We can distinguish two strategies for dealing with these cases. Suppose I notice someone I don’t recognize in the department and ask you who it is. Suppose you answer: it is a woman in blue dress. This information is useless to me, and you are aware of this. Have you given me a correct answer, but an irrelevant, useless and uninteresting one? Or have you not given an answer to my question at all? I shall not take a stand on this issue her e—success at inquiry requires an ability to identify ‘relevant’ answers, and that is my concern.

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ask a ‘who question’ or a ‘where question’, I am aware of a range of alternatives which can be eliminated, ev en if I am not awar e of many of the relevant predicates or of which places are possible locations for a book (for example). It may not occur to me that I may have left it on the bus.When I ask a ‘ why question’, I may not be awar e of any possible explanations, or of any that I cannot eliminate. That is why ‘why questions’ can be so hard. The other issues arise because the same answ er can be expressed in different ways, employing, for example, a different vocabulary. An answer can thus be infelicitously pr esented, even if it is corr ect. Thus effective inquirers need to be sure that they can formulate answers in ways that fit them for their intended use. How does context settle these things? How should we think about the context here? It is common to think of the context of an utterance as an evolving body of presuppositions, of things that are taken for granted by the participants, and, perhaps, are known to function as a body of shared background knowledge. When we consider solitary inquiries, we can recognize a limiting case of this. One possibility is that the context is composed of propositions that are accepted or matters of full belief , perhaps things we take to be certain. Alternatively, we can take the context as containing propositions that are treated as uncontroversial. What sort of information could be contained in these presuppositions which could be relevant to settling what sorts of answers to a given questions are to be taken seriously. There can be information about what sorts of answers are recognized as not real candidates, as not being r elevant at all. There can also be information about which candidate answ ers have already been r uled out. There might be information about what sor t of answer the questioner wants, and about what sort of answer the respondent expects the questioner to want. There may be assumptions about what the questioner wants to do with the information he hopes to obtain from his question or about what he ought to plan to do with that information. If we are concerned with the solitary case, the questioner and respondent will be the same, and this ur les out one source of error and misunderstanding. It is not possible that questioner and respondent have different views about what sort of answer will be appropriate. But, even in this case, it is possible that the agent will be mistaken about the sor t of answ er that is required. Suppose I ask myself who some person is, intending to use the information in order to predict what attitude they will take on some political issue. Suppose, too, that I believe that the best clue for making such a prediction is information about someone’s employment. So I assume that 13

the range of serious answers to my question concerns different sorts of job that the person could have. In fact I am wrong: information about where they live, or about their r eligious affi liations, will be far mor e valuable. This is the information I need when I ask my question; although it is not the information I actively seek. So long as the answer has an appropriate form, then whether an answ er is relevant or appropriate is a function of what it is to be used for, not of whether it is what the questioner explicitly has in mind. Talk of ‘ presuppositions’ here needs to be tr eated with caution. P hilosophers generally think of presuppositions as things that are believed to be true, and, when I described a context as providing a set of presuppositions, I went along with this. We need to allow that the presuppositions that guide the use of questions in inquiry can often be suppositions rather than presuppositions. Much counterfactual reasoning involves considering a hypothetical possibility, without being committed to its tr uth. Against the background of that hypothetical possibility , I can then inquir e into what the correct answers to various questions would be, if that hypothetical situation obtained. Within that part of the inquiry, we treat the supposition as fixed—at least for a short time—without being firmly committed to its truth. Indeed, if we are conducting a deliberation that involves a reductio ad absurdum, then we may treat something as true when we firmly believe it to be false. This does not aff ect the previous discussion. We have already noted that inquiries and deliberations ar e extended, structured goal dir ected activities. This means that the context of the investigation changes rapidly, as possibilities are considered, investigated and eliminated, as challenges are raised and responded to. This means that our understanding of what the context of an utterance is must be equally structured and complex. As well as taking note of the information erlevant to the interpretation of a par ticular assertion, judgment or question, w e need to keep track of its place in the structure of the inquiry as a whole. I can explain this by means of a simple example that illustrates how different who-questions can occur in the same inquir y while having diff erent sets of alternatives associated with them. Suppose I am a detective, trying to identify who murdered the colonel. I am told that just three people had the opportunity to commit the crime, so, I ask the question ‘ Who killed the colonel?’, against the backgr ound assumption that there are just these three candidates. Let us suppose they are Atkins, Burroughs, and Car ter, and I don ’t know much about them apart from that. I plan my inquir y, intending to fi nd which, if any , of 14

the three candidates had a motive to commit the crime. I need information about these people that will help me to solv e my problem. Perhaps I begin b y asking ‘ Who is Car ter?’, seeking an answ er that will suggest ways of establishing whether she has a motiv e to kill the colonel. But no such answer is forthcoming, so I turn to the second of my three questions, ‘Who is Atkins?’ and, we may suppose, arriv e at an answ er that helps to make it unlikely that Atkins is the criminal.When I then ask ‘Who is Burroughs?’, I am told that Carter knows more about him than anyone else, and I should seek information from her. In order to do so, I ask ‘ Who is Carter?’ again, this time as a means to obtaining information about Burroughs. In that case, ‘The woman o ver there’ may be a fully satisfactor y answer—it enables me to pursue my investigations about who Burroughs is. Having made some progress with that, I return to my question ‘Who is Carter?’, and once again, I have to admit that I don’t know. The information I possessed about her spatial whereabouts is irrelevant to my higherlevel inquiry into her likely guilt. We can picture the structure of the inquiry as comprising six levels: 1. Target: Who killed the colonel? 2. Subordinate inquiry: Which of A, B and C killed the colonel? 3. Subordinate inquiry: Which of A, B, and C had the motiv e to kill the colonel. 4. Three subordinate inquiries: Did A have a motive? Did B have a motive? Did C have a motive? 5. Three more subordinate inquiries (each subor dinate to the question above it) Who is A? Who is B? Who is C? 6. Yet another level (subordinate to the question immediately above it) Who is B? In understanding, and answering the questions, we need to keep track of this overall structure. The sort of information required of an answer to ‘Who is C?’ will v ary according to the lev el at which it is raised and the other questions to which it is subor dinate. I can answ er this question at level 6, but not as a question at lev el 5: accor ding to the lev el, it makes salient a diff erent set of alternativ e possibilities. Unless we can track the changing questions expressed by any given interrogative—unless we can track the shifting range of answers that are relevant to them—our ability to inquire effectively will be impaired. 15

4. Real questions and understanding We have discussed in general terms some issues about questions, answers and their roles in inquir y and deliberation. I n this section w e shall consider two fur ther questions. The first of these concerns what is inv olved in understanding questions. S ince we can use questions ev en if w e cannot identify their possible answ ers, it would be unr easonable to identify understanding a question with knowing what its possible answers are. Nor would it be realistic to claim that we understand a question only when we know how to answer it: much research in the sciences and philosophy is devoted to trying to answer intelligible questions that we don’t yet know how to answer. So, what is required for understanding a question? A erlated issue concerns what is required for a question to be real, for us to be able to ‘get a grip’ on it and take seriously the idea that we might try to answer it. Yet another issue concerns reasons for doubt: when is it reasonable for us to address a question, recognizing that it needs an answer and admitting that we do not currently have a secure answer to it? This section begins to address some of these questions. I shall star t by exploring some ideas and concepts used b y Nicholas Jardine in Scenes of Inquiry. We shall then use these as a tool for making sense of the cases w e have been considering. J ardine’s purposes ar e different from ours: his main concern is with the r ole of questions in the sciences and in the pr ospects for making the understanding of questions a central task in the historiography of science. He is interested in how we can understand the questions that were addressed by Galileo or Paracelsus or, his main example, eighteenth century natural history. Some questions ar e real, others ar en’t. If we ask who disco vered that the Thames was the longest river in Europe, the question is unreal because it rests on a false pr esupposition. When the logical positivists identifi ed questions such as ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ as nonsensical, we can read this as implying that they are unreal, that they have no true answers. Jardine begins with the mor e contextualised notion of a question being ‘locally real’ (1991, chapter three). A question Q is real for a community when they can ‘get a grip on it’. This rules out questions that are perceived as ‘utterly inscrutable’ or as carr ying false pr esuppositions, and is explained as follo ws. First, an answ er is straight when ‘it is both direct and adequate, in the sense that it conveys all the information that is called for’ (57). And an ‘evidential consideration E is relevant to a question Q? in community C just in case E is taken in C to fav our one 16

over (the disjunction of ) the other asser tions taken in C to be straight answers to Q?’. A question is locally real in C when there is an evidential consideration E that is held to be r elevant to Q? (57). S o a question is locally r eal (for a community) when that community r ecognizes some things as straight answers to it, and recognizes that some evidence would favour one of those answers over the rest. This gives some minimal sense to the communities knowing how to try to answer it. It is compatible with this that their inquiry may not get far, and also that the question actually has no correct straight answer: in the light of fur ther information it may emerge that it is not a real question at all. We can understand both questions that are real and those that are unreal—think of the example about the river Thames above. Jardine takes these in turn. His explanations make use of the idea of ‘cognitive frame’: this is the totality of the beliefs and commitments of a community . It includes general beliefs about what sort of evidential considerations are relevant to what sorts of questions, as w ell as the ‘beliefs and methodological commitments’ used by members of the community to justify those judgments of relevance. It thus includes what E rnest Sosa would call an ‘ epistemic perspective’ (1991, 97). J ardine suggests that w e understand locally r eal questions when we understand ‘the ways in which they ar e made real by our cognitiv e frame’. O ur understanding of unr eal questions is much more varied (Jardine 1991, 63ff), but we shall note just one of these. We understand the question ‘ Who discovered that the Thames was the longest river in Europe?’ by seeing how it would be real in a cognitive frame that differed from our own in including the belief that the Thames is the longest river in E urope. In general, w e can understand unr eal questions by considering variants of our cognitive situation in which they would be real; and often this will be very difficult. These questions of understanding and intelligibility of questions arise in two different contexts. First there are questions about the sort of understanding possessed by ordinary speakers involved in eliciting information from each other and ordinary inquirers (including ordinary scientists) trying to solve problems. Second, there is the sort of understanding required by historians and social scientists tr ying to understand the practices of inquiry employed in communities, perhaps in communities remote from their own. As philosophers we can describe both sorts of understanding. As Jardine records when discussing the difficulties of historical interpretation, most local methods are ‘routine and habitual, under normal circumstances rarely discussed or even articulated by their exponents’. And, he suggests, 17

it is these methods that hav e the largest role in determining which questions are real for a community. He mentions ‘tacit criteria by which [scientists] assign burdens of proof and judge the competence and wor th of other practioners and their findings’, tacit conventions of how to present materials to other practioners, and the role of ‘habitual competence in the use of instr uments’ in guiding experimental wor k (1991, 90). Although our concerns are not with scientifi c knowledge, however, it is easy to see that everyday inquiry and evaluation of argument is similarly guided b y what is routine, habitual, unarticulated, and, in different ways, tacit. The task of the historian is to make explicit what is tacit and habitual; but our everyday dealing with questions achieves understanding without this. We understand a question when our tacit and habitual understandings enable us to see ho w some evidential consideration or r eason is r elevant to its answer. It is clear, I think, that questions can be r eal for us that we don’t understand; we don’t see how or why the r easons favour some answer to our question. The examples of who-questions that we have just been looking at suggest a further dimension of understanding. I f we need to make judgments of relevance in identifying which things ar e actually candidate answ ers, we may also need to grasp what it is that makes something an appr opriate or good answer. Jardine’s account takes for granted the ideas of a ‘straight answer’, and I have been suggesting that for understanding many of our normal epistemic encounters with questions, this is not something w e can do. There are issues about how to identify what question is expressed by an interrogative, as well as issues about how, once we have identified a question, we can get to grips with it. The fact that a question is r eal for us does not entail that w e have any reason to tr y to answer it. We may not fi nd it interesting. There may be none of our other concerns to which its answer would be relevant, either by providing information that would be useful for practical purposes or yb offering information that will contribute to our ability to solve theoretical problems and better understand our surr oundings. Jardine distinguishes our scene of inquiry (the range of questions which is real for us) from our scene of response (the questions in our scene of inquir y that ‘engage with some aspect—cognitiv e, moral, aesthetic, etc.—of [our] attention and concern’) (1991, 68). These are the questions that ar e real in a str onger sense: they are experienced as needing an answer (rather than just as possessing one.) S uch questions ar e relevant to our concerns, and w e have standards (tacit as w ell as explicit) that go vern entr y into our scene of 18

response: the question ho w many grains of sand ther e are on B lackpool beach, for example, does not belong there. If we define the local reality of questions as Jardine has, then there are questions which are not locally real, but which engage with our attention and concern. It can be right for me to tr y to answer a question that does not belong within our ‘scene of inquiry’. The kind of case I am concerned about is one where the only answers I can think of (if any) can be eliminated, but I am confident that there is a correct answer to be found. And we might add, I have no real sense of where this unknown answer lies. Sylvain B romberger suggests that explanator y why-questions ar e responses to particular kinds of cognitive predicament. His example is his ignorance with respect to why kettles emit a humming noise just befor e the water begins to boil (1992, 27). The character of his pr edicament is that he believes that this question admits of a right answer (it is ‘sound’), but he can think of no possible answ er to which he cannot see decisiv e objections (1992, 29). Such a case may meet Jardine’s conditions for being locally real: Bromberger is aware of evidence that has been used to evaluate at least some answ ers; but he is not awar e of ho w that evidence can be used to evaluate answers that we may come up with in the future. His evidence eliminates all the options he can think of. It can still be rational to inquire into such questions, guided by the confident hope that answers will emerge, and by the hope that we will evaluate those answers in light of evidence. B ut in that case, our strategy of inquir y will be primarily focused, not on refuting or defending particular answers, but on looking for possible answers. So what do we (or should we) do in such cases? The motivational force rests on a substantial presupposition: there is a real question here, and we can discover what it is, and when we do, it will be a question that we can handle directly. And the first task of inquiry is to create a situation in which our interrogative expresses that real question. In order for this to happen, we may hav e to r evise answers that, w e had thought, had been r ejected. We may have to uncover the possibility of answers that, at present, we are not aware of. We can thus see the initial interr ogative, which expr esses no real question, as setting in motion a course of activities designed to enable us to find such a question. This might involve exploring the subject matter, hoping that useful ne w information may emerge. I t might also exploit our understanding of the unreal question. If we try to understand how the question could be r eal in counter factual circumstances, where we lack information that w e currently possess, then this can off er analo19

gies and models to exploit in making our diff erent attempts to make the question real. If a question is locally real, then, in appropriate circumstances, we can have reasons to try to answer it. It is not necessary, in such cases, that we know how to answer it, nor even that we think we know how to answer it. It is required that we can rationally hope that we can fi nd out how to answer it. And this hope can be supported by the fact that, at least in counterfactual situations, we can conceive of evidence that would be r elevant to answering it (or to answering analogous questions.) But our reaching a position where we are able to answ er it will depend upon fur ther cognitive advances or upon the cooperation of the world. O ur understanding of a question is thus heavily dependent upon our background knowledge and upon our confidence in the possibility of making appropriate progress towards a better understanding. In tackling the question we rely upon our background knowledge of how similar questions have been, or could have been, answered in other circumstances. Questions of this kind may be much mor e common, and much more important, than may be expected. Their features may be shared by questions that superfi cially look much mor e straightforward. The conclusion to draw here is that the semantics of interrogatives does little to guide us in recognizing whether something provides an answer to a given question. What the use of an interrogative is looking for in the way of an answer is largely determined by considerations that can be described as pragmatic: the motivations and interests of the person who asked the question; the shifting concerns that r esult fr om the dev elopment of a conv ersation, discussion, or inquiry; and the background knowledge of questioner and respondent. Answering questions, like asking questions, usually inv olves judgment, the ability to make assessments of particular cases while taking account of a broad context.4

4. I have given talks on this material on a number of occasions, most r ecently in Sheffield and Valencia, and at a confer ence on pragmatism in L ublin. I am v ery grateful for the help I have received from comments made on those occasions.

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REFERENCES Belnap, N. 1982. ‘Declaratives are not enough’, Philosophical Studies, 59, 1–30. Belnap, N. and S teel, T. 1976. The Logic of Q uestions and Answers. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bromberger, S. 1992. On What We Don’t Know. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Glanzberg, M. 2005. ‘Focus: a case study on the semantics-pragmatics boundary’, in Szabo, Z. G. (ed.) Semantics versus Pragmatics, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 72–110. Grimaltos, T. and Hookway, Ch. 1995. ‘When deduction leads to belief ’, Ratio, vol. VIII: 24–41. Harrah, D. 1984. ‘The logic of questions ’, in Handbook of P hilosophical Logic volume II, in Gabbay, D. and Guenther, F. (eds.) Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Hintikka, J. 2007. Socratic Epistemology: E xplorations of Kno wledge-Seeking b y Questioning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Higginbotham, J. 1993. ‘Interrogatives’, in Hale and Keyser (eds.) The View from Building 20. Cambridge MA: MIT Press: 195–227. Hookway, Ch. 1990. Scepticism. London: Routledge. — 1995–96. ‘Questions of context ’, Proceedings of the A ristotelian Society , vol. XCVI, 1–16. — 2005. ‘Interrogatives and uncontrollable abductions’, in Semiotica, 158, 101– 116. — 2006. ‘Epistemology and inquir y: the primacy of practice ’, in Hetherington, S. (ed.) Epistemology Futures. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 95–110. Jardine, N. 1991. Scenes of Inquiry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Willliams, B. 1972. ‘Knowledge and Reasons’, in G.H. von Wright (ed.) Problems in the Theory of Knowledge. The Hague: 1–11. Schaffer, J. 2007. ‘Kno wing the answ er’, in Philosophy and P henomenological Research LXXV, 383–403. Sosa, E. 1991. Knowledge in P erspective. Cambridge: Cambridge U niversity Press. Stampe, D. 1974. ‘Attributives and interrogatives’, in Munitz, M. and Unger, P. (eds.) Semantics and Philosophy, New York: New York University Press.

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Grazer Philosophische Studien 77 (2008), 23–44.

THE FIXATION OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE QUESTION-ANSWER PROCESS OF INQUIRY Claudine TIERCELIN Institut Universitaire de France Université Paris XII, Institut Jean Nicod Summary The aim of the paper is to pr esent some impor tant insights of C. H ookway’s pragmatist analysis of kno wledge viewed less in the standar d (Gettier) way, as justified true belief, than as a dynamic natural and normative question-answer process of inquiry, a reliable and successful agent-based enterprise, consisting in virtuous dispositions explaining how we can be held responsible for our beliefs and investigations. Despite the merits of such an appr oach, the paper sho ws that it may be inefficient in accounting for some challenges posed by scepticism or by the nature of epistemic normativity. In which case it might be premature to propose it as a ne w conception of kno wledge against the standar d one and worth considering a different, though still pragmatist, strategy, in which inquiry would aim at the fi xation of knowledge, still viewed as justifi ed true beliefs, i.e critical commonsensical, warrantedly asser tible, intellectual and sentimental dispositions for which the epistemic agent, vie wed less as an individual person than as a scientifi c community of inquirers, should be taken as a kno wing and reliable agent, both answerable and responsible for her assertions.

1. Introduction C. Hookway’s conception of knowledge retains many pragmatist insights and develops itself as an original basically virtue-theoretic strategy, viewing knowledge not so much as a justifi ed true belief enterprise, but rather as a question-answer process of inquiry in which the regulation of our affective states is par t and par cel of our theor etical deliberation, stating the right limits to be imposed both on our reasons to doubt and on our justifications for believing, thus setting the r ules of our practice of epistemic evaluation. Despite the merits of H ookway’s approach, one may doubt

its capacity to justify such a change in our standar d view of kno wledge, and in particular, to overcome the threat of scepticism, as may be shown from other pragmatist strategies concerning the natur e of asser tion, of inquiry, or the position to adopt to wards doubt. This is why it might be worth suggesting a diff erent, though still pragmatist, strategy in which the fi xation of kno wledge would rather be taken as the a im of inquir y, and knowledge itself defi ned in terms of basically commonsensical and critical (justified), warrantedly assertible (true) intellectual and sentimental dispositions and assertions (beliefs) for which the epistemic agent, viewed less as an individual reliable person than as a collective agent, or scientific community of inquirers, should be held both answerable, in so far as her cognitive abilities ar e less r ule-governed than fi xed by the constraints of the real, and responsible, since, even if she cannot control the whole of her epistemic evaluations, she should still be able to contr ol and criticize the methods she is using, and be strongly committed to her assertions, in order to receive credit for them, and be vie wed not only as a vir tuous inquirer but as a knowing and reliable agent. 2. C. Hookway’s conception of knowledge as a question-answer process of inquiry From his 1990 book on Scepticism to his latest writings, C. Hookway has kept underlining that “the focus of our ‘ epistemic lives’ is the activity of inquiry: we attempt to fi nd things out, to extend our kno wledge by carrying out investigations directed at answering questions, and to refine our knowledge by considering questions about things we currently hold to be true” (1994, 211). Without being a “full-blooded virtue epistemologist”, Hookway stresses that the main concern of epistemology should not be with improving a G ettier-type defi nition of kno wledge as justifi ed true belief, but rather “with explaining the evaluations we must be able to make if we carry out inquiries in a r esponsible, self-controlled fashion” (1994, 212). For “we don’t understand a concept like justification until we grasp its role in evaluations employed in ‘ordering’ or regulating inquiries, and we have no need for a theory of justification until it is required to explain these evaluations” (ibid.). Indeed, a fundamental problem for epistemology concerns how it is possible for us to carry out the investigations required for effective and responsible inquiry, and this is threatened by the possibility of scepticism, as Hookway noted in his 1990 book on Scepticism, namely 24

the possibility of our being unable to take r esponsibility for whether w e inquire and deliberate well, or for a distinctive kind of autonomous inquiry. Now sceptical arguments could be r esisted only if w e could make sense of a way in which the role of reflection in the control of inquiry could be limited, since our investigations “depend upon a body of largely acquired habits, whose internal operations ar e opaque to us ”. Thus, at least in so far as Hookway might have been taken to defend a position close to some responsibilist-virtue epistemology, this was based on the claim, as noted in “How to be a virtue epistemologist?”, “not that we should define ‘justified belief ’ in terms of the vir tues, but, rather, that we shall only understand how we can regulate deliberations and inquiries, how we can control our opinions and inquir e well, by giving a central r ole to states such as virtues: indeed, the role of virtues in theoretical deliberation (in identifying reasons for belief , for example), parallels the r ole of vir tues in practical deliberation (in identifying reasons for action).” In search for “a better way of explaining how our deliberations could be so subject to infl uences we can think of as alien, perhaps as heter onomous”, Hookway thus came to “focus on their role in the regulation of inquiry and deliberation and took it that the primary focus of epistemic evaluation was control of activities of deliberation and inquir y, rather than the (largely thir d person) evaluation of states of belief as ‘justifi ed’ or as ‘kno wledge’” (ibid.). In other words, one should pass from the attempt to explain what knowledge and justified belief are, or to inv estigate how far we are able to possess states of knowledge and justified belief, to the following alternative attempt: to describe and explain our practice of epistemic ev aluation; to inv estigate how far our epistemic goals ar e appropriate and ho w far our ev aluative practice enables us to achieve our epistemic ends. More and more, and in the line of Dewey who took inquiry and questioning as being almost synonymous 1, Hookway comes to argue that if epistemic norms ar e to guide one ’s inquiries, then a cr ucial issue for all candidate analyses of epistemic ev aluation is what makes something count as a correct answer to a question (1999). I t is a sign of epistemic virtue that one asks the right questions when making a claim, and this also gives a way to av oid scepticism: for example, when making a claim about the time of the next train to London, it would be obsessiv e to feel 1. See Dewey’s account of inquiry in his Logic: inquiry responds to an “indeterminate situation”. Rational inquiry requires us first to institute a problem, in effect, to identify a question which focuses the indeterminacy which motiv ates us to inquir y (1938, 107–8); in H ookway 1999, 14.

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obliged to check that there are no misprints in the printed timetable; but it would be rash to ignor e the possibility that y esterday’s rail strike has disrupted the schedules” (1994a, 1994b). “If I have no response to a challenge based upon this second possibility , I should r econsider my claim. Unless confronted by evidence of widespread inaccuracy in the timetable, I would be irrational to take the former into account. The possibility that I might be a brain in a vat grounds a challenge which I ought perhaps to take account of when engaged in a cer tain sort of philosophical inquir y, but I hope that my informants never regard it as relevant when asked for information about train times. “Context ” in that case, determines what questions (or challenges) I should hav e answ ers to befor e confi dently making a claim to knowledge. So understanding these context relativities requires us to understand which challenges to our kno wledge claims w e should take seriously” (1999, 4). “When we conduct an inquiry, or deliberate on some matter , we attempt to formulate questions and to answ er them correctly. We reflect on what we ought to do in order to arrive at a satisfactory answer. As rational, reflective agents, we monitor our inquiries asking further questions about how well we are conducting them, about the acceptability of interim results and so on. The epistemic status of the conclusions of our inquiry can depend upon how well it has been carried out. Have the right questions been asked and have they been investigated in a r esponsible manner? The obsessive over cautious agent may ask too many questions, considering challenges which a better cognitiv e agent knows can be ignor ed. A rash irr esponsible inquirer is too unr eflective, asking too few questions and unsuspicious of the possibilities of error. My claim to kno wledge expresses confi dence that no questions which need to be raised about my opinion hav e been left unaddr essed, and all those questions which have been considered have been resolved in a satisfactory manner.” (1999, 7–8). In other words, “philosophers have paid insufficient attention to the logic and semantics of questions ” (Hookway 1999, 8). Now, “most assertions are responses to questions” and “rather than seeing the question as containing (implicitly) a proposition, we might (with more justice) see the assertion as containing a question … In different contexts, the same interrogative sentence can be used to ask very different questions … Talking of my attitudes and r esponses to questions helps to str ucture the information I hold which is normally expr essed in terms of beliefs. ” (1999, 10–11). Besides, ignoring the role of questioning “encourages a very static conception of mind and disguises from us the extent to which thinking is an 26

active process of raising questions and trying different ways of answering them … We use the concept of knowledge to identify informants. When I discover that you know something, I can accept y our testimony on the matter…Assertions, when directed at others or to oneself in solitary reflection, typically purport to express knowledge. We should try to understand the concept of knowledge by investigating its role in such practices” (1999, 11). Hence, “the general pattern of kno wledge”, according to Hookway, should rather take the following form: 1. X knows Q 2. X’s answer to Q is p 3. So, p. How does the schema r eflect the classical one in terms of “justifi ed true belief ”? “The three components of the traditional analysis of kno wledge relate to diff erent stages of this schema. The requirement that X believ e that p is a r eflection of the r equirement that p be X ’s answer to Q. The requirement that the belief be true derives from the demand that 3 should follow from 1 and 2; and the justification requirement expresses the need for some pr operty which warrants the asser tion of 1—a pr operty that ensures that whatever answer is offered to our question will be the correct one (cf. Scepticism, chap. 10). These remarks suggest that we should treat knowledge as a relation between an individual and a question rather than between an individual and a pr oposition. The question determines what sorts of challenges should be taken into account and what sor ts of inquiries should be conducted” (1999, 11). From his analysis, Hookway emphasizes the need to focus on adynamic rather than static view of knowledge as inquiry, deliberative investigation, but also on an ev aluation of our epistemic practices, and fi nally on an agent-based model, in which skills in deliberation and inquiry are viewed as vir tues or character-traits (like attentiv eness, fair mindedness, openmindedness, intellectual tenacity and courage) engaging the ersponsibility of the agent taken in a question-answer situation involving the necessary account of the asser tive context: indeed, our abilities ar e relative to our environment and to a lot of background knowledge. Ther efore, we should try to r egulate our inquiries in terms of guidance and pr escription, and determine the right type of conduct we should have: this implies knowing what questions to raise or to avoid, being observant, but also, and importantly, being aware of the meaninglessness of certain claims to knowledge, 27

or, contra the radical sceptic, of some attempts to fi nd endless justifi cations. Furthermore, it involves paying attention to the process of theoretical deliberation, viewing it in parallel with practical deliberation. All this supposes control but also a lot of uncontrolled, unreflective processes. Indeed, much of the knowledge and information that guides us in performing our activities and practices does so without being represented in deliberation. Therefore, we should take account of a twofold consciousand unconscious process, namely a conscious r eflection—crucial to understanding ho w it shapes our habits—though occurring against a background of what seems to be habits of thought and reflection. Indeed, unless we possess the appropriate body of habits, w e seem to be incapable of the kinds of r eflection required for effective deliberation (cf. Dewey): in other words, there seems to be a kind of normal sensitivity to the normativ e demands of r eason. This explains the importance of such phenomena as salience, appropriateness and relevance, but also of epistemic akrasia (Hookway, 2001): indeed, unless we have mastered such normative standards in the form of habits or skills, we will be unable to ex ercise the deliberative capacities that are required for effective actions. As another classical pragmatist (Peirce) had already pointed out, this shows how decisive are such virtues as observance, open-mindedness, etc. In short, on the one hand, “possession of epistemic virtue depends upon the possession of skills and habits whose possession is largely independent of the recognition that some state is, in fact, such a virtue. And possession of these capacities seems to be what is required for confidence in one’s deliberative skills, for example in one’s sense of salience, not to be an impediment to one’s freedom of mind”. On the other hand, such form of habits of thought, skills in the use of concepts and argument forms, ways of ex ercising judgement in w eighing considerations ar e not available to intr ospection or consciousness. As a consequence, complex cognitive achievements can have a sort of phenomenological immediacy which “mimicks foundationalism” (1993, 2003) and ought to be analyzed as such. This is why, contrar y to a conception of disengaged “inquir y”, Hookway is more and more inclined to focus on the analysis of such affective (or metacognitive) states as emotional involvement, anxiety, “feeling of knowing”, “sentiment of rationality” (W. James), which play such an essential role in raising genuine ( contra paper) doubts, in characterizing our general cognitive practices, and even in explaining how our epistemic evaluations are possible at all (2002, 2003, 2008a and 2008b).

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3. The merits of Hookway’s virtue-theoretic and pragmatist approach Such a pragmatist view of knowledge, modelled on the classical pragmatist account as the general pr ocess which leads fr om an unsettling state of belief-disposition which gave rise to a genuine doubt, to a satisfactor y state of belief (Peirce, Dewey) has many merits: rather than directly focusing on such problematic concepts as “justifi cation”(always threatened by vicious regress, circularity, dogmatic stopping-point, and often leading to some form or other of neo-pyrrhonism), “truth”(with all its paraphernalia of metaphysical obscurities linked with such concepts as correspondence, coherence, but also strict utility or v erification), and “kno wledge” (with all the Plato-Gettier aporia it leads to, whatev er the—coherentist, foundationalist, counterfactual, reliabilist, internalist or externalist—proposed definitions may be), w e might w ell be in a better situation b y vie wing knowledge, not as static belief-pr opositions, but rather as some mental agents’questioning states, related to inquirers directly engaged in practices of epistemic evaluation. After all, as the classical pragmatists have claimed, it might be more economical and less problematic to analyze “truth” in a metaphysically neutral way, either along “redundantist” lines (F. Ramsey) or in terms of “the ideal limit of inquiry” (Peirce) or as stating some minimal “warranted assertability” conditions (Dewey), and insist more on the advantages of a genuine account of the semantics of assertion and of our various methods of inquir y. B esides, if kno wledge is vie wed in r elation with our assertive and questioning practices, not only does it throw light on what counts as epistemic agency, but it aff ords new interesting links between epistemology and the philosophy of mind and even with cognitive psychology and metacognition, since it pr oposes better accounts of the etiology of our epistemic states, thr ough the study of ho w a person formed her beliefs, how sentiments and affective states are linked with our best rational judgements and not opposed to them (as often underlined by both W. James and C. S. Peirce), thus providing plausible explanations of the ways in which some epistemic norms may be related with (or even may emerge from?) our nature (Tiercelin 1997); again, in sho wing how, for example, our investigations still aim at knowledge and truth, or how deliberation is both theoretical and practical, it provides, as all pragmatists recommend, a more convincing account of the ways in which knowledge is tied to action. Finally, in looking at belief-dispositions or habits not only through Aristotelian lenses, but thr ough Peircian lenses, w e get an interesting explanation of the reasons why, although our belief-habits are 29

stable and rigid, they ar e also radically indeterminate, thus allo wing for changes, evolution and learning through new experiences and unexpected encounters which often oblige us to “ overthrow the whole car tload” of our previous beliefs (fallibilism, as the pragmatists claim, being par t and parcel of any knowing experience). 4. Some problems with the question-answer or knowledge-as-inquiry conception However illuminating such an approach may be, it encounters some obvious difficulties: after all, one may object, even though knowledge may be equated with inquiry or with a question-answer process, it does not mean that this is all there is to knowledge or that justification should no longer be viewed as an impor tant issue to settle. A quick look at another pragmatist approach such as Peirce’s, as far as his vie ws on assertion, inquiry or doubt are concerned, might be helpful here. 1. Let us take assertion first. For Peirce, “any symbol involves an assertion, at least r udimentary” (CP. 2.34). E nabling one to distinguish betw een the volitional content fr om the r epresentative or pr opositional content, the symbol ar ticulates the iconic elements ( i.e. the elements which hav e some formal r esemblance with the object) and the indexical elements (i.e .those which have some physical resemblance with the object) of the proposition. Indeed, even if it is upon the symbol that the whole w eight of assertion bears (Brock 1981; Tiercelin, 1993a, 281–305), an assertion has no meaning except through some designation that shows whether one refers to the real universe or what universe of fiction it is about (CP.8.368). Hence the importance of the indexical element of the proposition. More precisely, an asser tion is an act in which the speaker addr esses a listener, formulates a propositional symbol and assumes some r esponsibility concerning the truth of that symbol. Any assertion implies, on the part of the speaker, that he believes or knows what he asserts (knowledge is the norm of assertion) and that he intends to conv ey the same belief and the same knowledge to his listener . Thus, it is fi rst of all the speaker who has the main responsibility: it is his task to eliminate any imprecision that might be an obstacle to communication. This involves, on the utterer’s part, “a voluntary self-subjection to penalties ” in the ev ent that the pr oposition turns out to be false (Ms 517). And P eirce goes so far as to say that such 30

penalties ar e comparable to the legal penalties associated with making a false statement under oath (Ms 517; NEM IV , 249). Why is that so? Because assertion takes place within the context of what Peirce, following the terminology of the M odists, calls a “Speculative Grammar”, i.e. that part of Logic which deals with the formal conditions of symbols that have a meaning (CP 1.559; CP 4.116). Not only has a sign or symbol meaning within the propositional and assertive context in which it is inserted (CP 4.583; cf. CP 4.56, 551): “Thought must have some possible interpretation for some possible interpreter”, wherein lies the very being of its being (CP 4.6), in other words, its dialogical character. But, more generally, Speculative Grammar is identified with an Erkenntnistheorie or epistemology which considers “in what sense and ho w there can be any tr ue proposition and false proposition, and what are the general conditions to which thought or signs of any kind must conform in order to assert anything” (CP 2.206). Its formal or “ quasi-necessary” task being to establish what must be tr ue of the representamina that ar e being used b y a Scientifi c Intelligence, in order for them to embody any meaning whatsoev er (CP 2.229) , i.e. an Intelligence (linked with thecommunity of investigators rather than limited to an individual) which is incapable of intuition, in accor dance with the conclusions established by the three 1868 articles of The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (W2, 193–272), and which cannot possibly learn except by following the rules of inductive, abductive and deductive inference, as applied to experience; an Intelligence too, which has accepted certain aims and methods, among others the principle on which a discourse is meaningful only if its deliberate aim is to put the process of rational inquiry at the service of knowledge and tr uth, which can only be r eached through self-control processes2. All of this presupposes on both parts that the speakers involved in assertion, have a cer tain competence and that they par take to a community of ideals and aims of speech. Both want to communicate, to learn and to know, that is, to try and suppress all kinds of ambiguity that might creep into the rational pr ocess and br eak communication (due to the fact, in particular, that no sign, for Peirce, is either totally determinate, or totally indeterminate). Indeed, any symbol, or sign is capable of determining a further symbol which interpr ets it or translates it, so that it is at least 2. This is why, for Peirce, such a Grammar involves at least, a theory of communication, a theory of the norms that go vern communication, a theor y of pr opositional symbols, a theor y of truth, of meaning, of belief , and of kno wledge and a theor y of vagueness as applying to all signs (Brock 1975, 129; 1979; Tiercelin 1993a, 258–334).

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potentially indeterminate.3 At the same time, “Honest people, when not joking, intend to make the meaning of their wor ds determinate, so that there shall be no latitude of interpr etation at all” (5.447). Thus, it is the context or the situation of asser tion that gives the rules of the right functioning of vagueness and generality. But the situation is far fr om edenic: the question is not so much to describe a situation of communication or of dialogue between speakers that care about one another than to provide the rules of a game. As R. H ilpinen (1982) has pointed out rightly, such analyses have much in common with the strategy adopted b y Hintikka in his G ame-Theoretical semantics (1979). B ut why is that so? B ecause, what is at stake, is not any kind of communication or some Habermasian quiet ethics of discussion: it is the communication of truth. Now, for Peirce, truth goes hand in hand with the adoption of beliefs: ther efore, the speaker must, one way or another, have his belief adopted by his listener. For the aim of communication is nothing, but an “ endeavour to make the person addressed (i.e. the interpreter) think in a cer tain way”, that is believe something.4 No wonder then if the asser tion fi nds its expr ession in descriptions which have more in common with confl ict than dialogue. The speaker 3. “A sign (under which designation I place ev ery kind of thought, and not alone external signs), that is in any respect objectively indeterminate (i.e. whose object is undetermined by the sign itself) is objectively general in so far as it extends to the interpreter the privilege of carrying its determination fur ther. Example: ‘Man is mor tal’. To the question, ‘ What man?’ the r eply is that the proposition explicitly leaves it to you its assertion to what man or men y ou will (cf. 2.357). A sign that is objectively indeterminate in any respect is objectively vague in so far as it reserves further determination to be made in some other conceiv able sign, or at least does not appoint the interpr eter as its deputy in this offi ce. Example: ‘A man whom I could mention seems a little conceited. ’ The suggestion here is that the man in vie w is the person addr essed; but the utterer does not authoriz e such an interpr etation or any other application of what she says. She can still say, if she likes, that she does not mean the person addressed. Every utterance naturally leaves the right of fur ther exposition in the utter er; and therefore, in so far as a sign is indeterminate, it is vague, unless it is expressly or by a well-understood convention rendered general” (5.447). A sign is objectiv ely general, in so far as, leaving its eff ective interpretation indeterminate, it surr enders to the interpr eter the right of completing the determination for himself. ‘Man is mortal’. ‘What man?’, ‘Any man you like’. A sign is objectively vague in so far as, leaving its interpretation more or less indeterminate, it reserves for some other possible sign or experience the function of completing the determination. ‘This month’, says the almanachoracle, ‘a great event is to happen’. ‘What event?’ ‘Oh, we shall see. The almanach does not say that.’” (5.505). 4. Ms 284: “The assertion consists in furnishing of evidence b y the speaker to the listener that the speaker believ es something, that is, fi nds a cer tain idea to be defi nitively compulsory on a certain occasion” (Ms 787; see CP 2.335).

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who asserts a proposition accepts to be held responsible for it, and subjects himself to possible penalties, in case the proposition turns out to be false.5 The speaker is a defender of his o wn position; as for the listener, it is his interest to try and detect a possible falsehood committed b y the speaker, since “the affirmation of a proposition may determine a judgement to the same effect in the mind of the interpreter to his cost” (Ms 517; NEM IV, 249). Hence the utter er and the interpr eter hav e opposite interests and attitudes with regard to the truth of any proposition asserted by the former (Hilpinen 1982, 185), so diffi cult is it to give up one’s beliefs.6 This is why the interpr eter of a pr oposition is at times called its “ opponent” (e.g. in Ms 515) 7. Indeed, although all communication implies the mutual r espect of a number of tacit assumptions, some agreement on the aim of communication on both parts, no “latitude of interpretation” (CP 5.447), the necessarily asymmetrical situation which prevails between both speakers does not make the elimination of indetermination in all cases desirable. The speaker may have some interest in remaining in a certain fuzziness (CP 5.505n1; cf. CP 3.94). However, if the speaker wants to convince or to communicate an information, it is up to him to qualify (though not eliminate) it, either by using indexical signs indefinite enough so that “the sign is not sufficiently expressing itself to allo w of an indubitable determinate interpr etation” (CP 5.448n1) or b y accepting to extend “to the interpreter the privilege of carrying its determination fur ther” (CP 5.447), thus turning a pr eviously vague assertion into a general one, as when the utterer leaves it to the interpreter to complete the determination of the implications of such an assertion as: “This being filthy, in every sense of that term”, thus counting on the “ collateral” (CP 8.178–9) or backgr ound information linked to the system of conv entions (such as determinate index es (proper names) or indefinite ones (such as common nouns) to facilitate interpretation and to determine who, the utter er or the interpr eter will be in a position of defense or attack (Ms 283; cf . Hintikka’s interpretation of quantifi ers in 5. “To assert a proposition means to accept responsibility for it, so that if it turns out ill, or as Mr. Schiller says (by implication) unsatisfactory, in a certain way which we need not defi ne, but which is called proving to be false, he who asserted it regrets having done so” (Ms 280). 6. “The utterer is essentially a defender of his o wn position and wishes to interpr et it so that it will be defensible. The interpreter, not being so interested, and being unable to interpret it fully without considering to what extreme it may reach, is relatively in a hostile attitude, and looks for the interpretation least defensible” (Ms 9, 3-4). 7. Thus, the language-game occurring between the speaker and the interpreter with respect to an indeterminate proposition is very close to what Hintikka calls a zero-sum game (1979, 51).

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game-theoretical semantics 1979, 51)). B ut the context of the asser tion (in other words its pragmatic dimension) is the thir d means invoked by Peirce—since “no general description can identify an object”—to explain how an object of experience can be identified, besides its being singularized: “The common sense of the interpreter of the sign will assure him that the object must be one of a limited collection of objects ”.8 Thus the puzzle is solved in a way, closer to “rank pragmatism” than to a straightfor ward “commonsensism”, much in keeping with the famous P eircian maxim: “Consider what eff ects that might conceiv ably hav e practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to hav e. Then our conception of these eff ects is the whole of our conception of the object ”. But again, if assertion is tied to such pragmatist constraints, it is because it operates within an epistemic context in which what is at stake, aimed at, in the question-answer process, is not any kind of communication, but the communication of knowledge and truth. 2. What about inquir y? How should it be depicted? I ndeed, as rightly insisted on b y C. H ookway, as a r esponsibilist inv estigation, in which some epistemic traits of vir tuous character such as honesty , economy, confidence, and such aff ective states as emotions, sentiments, feelings of knowing have to be instanced in order, not only to determine whether we are engaged in a genuine process or a mere “paper” doubt or fake enterprise, but to explain ho w we can be vie wed as r eliable and r esponsible agents: 8. “Suppose, for example, two E nglishmen to meet in a continental railway carriage. The total number of subjects of which there is any appreciable probability that one will speak to the other perhaps does not ex ceed a million, and each will hav e perhaps half that million not far below the surface of consciousness, so that each unit is r eady to suggest itself. If one mentions Charles the S econd, the other need not consider what Charles the S econd is meant. I t is no doubt the English Charles the Second. Charles the Second was a quite different man on different days; and it might be said that without fur ther specifi cation the subject is not identifi ed. But the two E nglishmen have no purpose of splitting hairs in their talk; and the latitude of interpretation which constitutes the indeterminacy of a sign must be understood as a latitude which might affect the achievement of a purpose. For two signs whose meanings are for all possible purposes equivalent are absolutely equivalent. This is, to be sur e, rank pragmaticism; for a purpose is an aff ection of action” (CP 5.448n1). “S uppose the chat of our E nglishmen had fallen upon the colour of Charles II’s hair. Now that colours are seen quite differently by different retinas is known. That the chromatic sense is much more varied than it is positively known to be is quite likely. It is very unlikely that either of the trav ellers is trained to obser ve colours or is a master of their nomenclatur e. But if one says that Charles II had dar k auburn hair, the other will understand him quite pr ecisely enough for all their possible purposes, and it will be a determinate predication” (ibid.).

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however, these are not the only requirements to be met by an inquirer: as far as doubt is concerned, P eirce claims that the only way to justify our reasons for doubting does not so much per tain to feelings, emotions or affectives states (which belong to what he calls in his categorial jargon, “Firstness”) as to reactions, existential shocks (“Secondness”) encountered when we meet some “recalcitrant” experience, which forces us to revise our previous beliefs. Again, the only way to make sure that our beliefs are not mere prejudices or are not fixed in the wrong way—because, for example, we would be using such spurious methods as the a priori (or psy chologistic, subjectivist) method, or the method of “ tenacity” or the method of “authority” (see “The Fixation of Belief ”, or “How to make our ideas clear” 1878–79)—is to rely on the “scientific method”, the justification of which is provided by the fact that there are “real things” which are stable, external enough (though not totally independent of our thinking about them) to constrain and “fi x” our beliefs in the appr opriate way. In other words, inquiry is part and parcel of a strong realistic commitment and of an allegiance not to mere conversational “maxims” or to some set of “questions” and “answers”, but to the strict rules of the scientifi c method itself with all its inferential requirements in terms of deduction, induction and abduction, and its methodological procedures (as prescribed, in particular, by the “economy of research”). So inquiry implies more than deliberation and discussion: it implies a strong commitment to norms and it is liable to penalties. Indeed, for Peirce, some “ethics of inquiry” is needed. But this should not dispense us either with some e“thics of belief”, as can be shown from Peirce’s severe condemnation of James’s position in the Clifford-James debate (Haack 1997; Tiercelin 2005a, 196ff .) and his siding rather with an attenuated Cliffordian (or basically evidentialist) position. 3. What about doubt? One of the challenges any account of kno wledge has to face is the threat of scepticism. How does Hookway’s account bear upon scepticism? Or does it even face the issue? 9 As he notes himself, “it would be nice to defuse scepticism b y arguing that when w e leav e the 9. This is an objection addressed to Hookway by Marie McGinn in her reply to Hookway 2003 (2003, 99–100): “But [a consequence of Hookway’s view] means that I can take my current emotional evaluations as a proper ground for rejecting the sceptic’s questions only by assuming the very thing that the sceptical voice in me doubts—that is, by arguing in a circle”. “Moreover, given that Hookway’s account of our ordinary practice acknowledges that the relation between the emotional evaluations on which it r ests and objective truth is contingent, it is har d to see how the work of resisting skepticism in a philosophical context is to be achiev ed” (99).

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backgammon table and raise global questions about whether w e know anything at all, our interrogative sentences cease to express genuine questions. I am doubtful that such an argument can be made to work—and if it can it is likely that we should conclude only that our sceptical anxieties should not be expr essed using the concept of kno wledge. Deeper worries about our ability to carr y out inquiries responsibly or to for mulate questions effectively might remain (italics mine). M ore promising is the suggestion that since an interr ogative sentence will be used to ar ticulate diff erent questions (or formulate different problems) in different contexts, there is no direct route (italics mine) from the impropriety of claiming knowledge of some fact in a distinctively philosophical context to the impropriety of doing so in an ev eryday context” (1999, 16). However is this enough to constitute an effi cient “parry” to scepticism under its most serious forms (in particular the Cartesian sceptical scenario), at least if we are not totally convinced by any contextualist suggested solution to it? Here it might be worth comparing two types of strategies that have been provided by Wittgenstein and Peirce, along what sounds undoubtedly like a “ pragmatist” line of thought, close, in many ways, to the one suggested b y Hookway himself. Briefly, all have a lot in common in terms of the diagnosis and the reaction they deem necessary to the Cartesian sceptical scenario (or radical doubt): a doubt must have practical effects otherwise it is vain and vacuous; radical doubt is not so much unpractical or unr easonable as intrinsically incomprehensible: it is contrary to the logic of judgement, which needs to be put in context; a mere logical possibility of doubt does not constitute a real one. Doubt presupposes a system of beliefs and previous certainties: “If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put ” (OC, 343). The Cartesian scenario, Wittgenstein claims, is based on a confusion between what is empirical and grammatical. Therefore, a Moorean type of answer, relying on Commonsense is not the right one. There are many problems with the use of the wor d “kno w”. I ndeed, Moore’s “propositions” ar e neither true nor false: they ar e just accepted. This is also why it is useless to ask to justify them. Justification must end some where. So not only is the Cartesian sceptical challenge meaningless but so is Agrippa’s sceptical challenge (the infinite regress sceptical scenario). However, as has been often noted, a large part of Wittgenstein’s answer relies on ambiguities related to the epistemic status of the “hinge” propositions: are they logical, analytical truths, rules, principles, practical norms, norms “in context”, “standing” or “unearned” certainties (Wright 2004)? It is not easy to tell. Quite different is Peirce’s off ensive strategy: fi rst, he has his o wn (and naturalistic rather 36

than “grammatical”) r easons against radical doubt: as w e noted pr eviously, for him, doubt must have an external cause in order to be real. This leads him to insist more indeed on the links with the doubt-belief (habit) structure (or struggle) of inquiry (rather than of knowledge proper). What is important is tofi x belief, the “settlement of opinion”: “A true doubt is a doubt which really interferes with the smooth working of the belief-habit” (CP 5.510). Secondly, whereas Wittgenstein’s reply consists in underlining the groundlessness of beliefs—and stressing their “mobile” epistemic status (hinge-propositions)—Peirce has a two-levels answer: 1. He adopts a form of C ritical Common S ensism (inspired by both R eid and Kant, and mixes “indubitable” beliefs with a some what extreme fallibilism. 2. He follows a strategy consisting, as noted earlier , in sor ting out, among several methods for fi xing belief, the method which is the only one able to fi x belief (i.e to calm the uneasiness cr eated by doubt): the Scientifi c Method based on the hypothesis of Reality (both fixed by experience and by the community of investigators).This explains why, in the end, we have two rather different “parries” to the sceptical challenge. Both pragmatists, generally speaking, r eject the Car tesian sceptical scenario: a doubt (as Hookway also emphasizes) must be contextualized. All seem to accept the view that “at the foundation of w ell-founded belief lies belief that is not founded” (OC, 253). In other words, some beliefs do not per tain to the vocabulary of foundation, justifi cation, knowledge. Hinge propositions are not strictly speaking known, since they ar e outside epistemic ev aluation. From which it seems easy to conclude that one can admit the infi nite regress argument without scepticism follo wing therefrom. Indeed, for a doubt to be possible, does not mean for it to be necessary. Even when we could doubt, we simply do not (cf. OC, 509): “The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing ” (OC, 166). This is why their r eply to the sceptic is at times paradoxical, since it induces a form of scepticism towards justifi cation, very much in the spirit of neo-pyrrhonism which refuses to accept the philosophical perspectiv e adopted b y both dogmatic sceptics and their opponents (Fogelin 1994, 99). In the same way, Peirce’s extreme fallibilism at times only separates him fr om scepticism by a hair’s breadth (as often noted by Hookway himself). However, while specific difficulties are posed by the epistemic status ofWittgenstein’s hinge propositions (especially if meant as r ules defi ning a practice), in terms of any empirical inquiry which is traditionally conceived as aiming at truth, Peirce’s “parry” seems mor e “efficient”, in so far as, for him, any belief may be criticized, at least if there are positive reasons for that. A Common 37

Sensical answer? Hardly, since Commonsensism remains irreducibly critical and normative. Finally, one may wonder whether Hookway’s approach, focusing, as it does, on the description of our evaluative practices, is suffi cient, not only to defuse scepticism, but to get the right type of epistemic normativity we are looking for.10 5. Conclusions and suggestions from a standard and pragmatist approach Hookway is surely right to stress the importance of viewing knowledge as a question-answer process of inquiry. However, he may not have provided strong enough arguments in fav or of a total r evision of our concept of knowledge or, by the same token, of the primary task of epistemology itself. It may well be that the “standard” account has to be modifi ed, in view of the various aporia it faces. But one might also suggest a different “pragmatist” strategy, which would start from the traditional (though modified and improved)11 definition of kno wledge, rather than fr om a vir tue theoretic approach, question-answer, or knowledge as inquiry approach and would add two impor tant “pragmatist” principles: 1) The refusal of the principle 10. See M. McGinn’s criticism in 2003. 11. In Tiercelin 2005a, 267 ff., I have given a detailed analysis of what might be such “constraints” on knowledge (rather than necessary and sufficient conditions) and suggested a definition along the follo wing lines. Briefly: (K) S knows that P iff : a) S believes that P (belief being less an internal mental state than a disposition to action)(as noted by A. Bain, Peirce or Ramsey); b) P is true (truth being itself conceived either on the mode of warranted assertibility (Dewey), at the ideal limit of inquiry (Peirce), or in a merely redundantist fashion (Ramsey): truth is success; it is in itself metaphysically neutral; what r eally matters is what goes together with it: our assertions, our investigations); c) S is (most often: because of the ever present risk of fallibilism) justified in believing that P, namely, essentially, that: 1. S would believ e that P iff P were true (obeying E. Sosa’s principle of safety; along Reidian, Peircian, neo-Moorean principles of commonsense). 2. If P were not true in relevant circumstances, S would not believe P (principle of “sensitivity”); in case our until now best established beliefs encountered the shock of recalcitrant experience, then we should be ready to “overthrow our whole cartload of beliefs“ (Peirce’s critical commensism). 3. If, in other relevant circumstances, P were still true, S would still believe that P (“counterfactual” conditions formulated by Nozick—translatable into the lessons to be drawn from the pragmatist maxim, along a subjunctive conditional reading: in order to get the meaning of the hardness of the diamond, one can always translate it into a set of conditionals: “If the diamond was pressed upon, it would not break” (reality of the “would-be” or disposition)). 4. S is justifi ed in believing that P b y a proper reliable causal process (Goldman): hence, irrelevant counterfactual situations are excluded, the reliability of the process being itself a matter of trust on our part in our cognitive (intellective and active) faculties (Reid, Peirce, Sosa, Greco).

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of radical generality, which goes hand in hand with the sceptical argument: as a consequence, an analysis is required of the conditions of possibility of doubt itself, and not only of knowledge: “Doubt itself needs to be justified” (Reid, Peirce and Wittgenstein); we should always find a way to distinguish between paper (or chamber) doubt and genuine r easons for doubt; r ely either on certain rules or norms (hinge propositions in Wittgenstein’s style) or on principles (closer to Common S ense), but constantly submit such principles—which, incidentally, are not fi xed (Reid) but ev olutive: “ We outgrow the applicability of instinct ” (Peirce)—to our criticism and control; and show that the sceptical objections ar e most often strong because they refuse any kind ofcontextualization. However, invoking contextualism does not amount to holding that the epistemic status of a proposition may vary according to purely conversational, cultural, social (or other) factors: it is to hold that, independently of such infl uences, a proposition has no epistemic status whatsoever. Thus formulated, contextualism implies a form of externalism, for even if proper contextual constraints have to be satisfied in order for such and such a proposition to be able to count as knowledge, such constraints need not be actually claimed, kno wn, nor ev en believed, even if some minimal sensitivity to such constraints (because of their causal impact) is unav oidable (as str essed by Williamson 2000). I n that respect, a pragmatist r efuses the irr elevant choice—due to an (accor ding to him) err oneous split betw een the internal and the external—between internalism and externalim. I n particular, not accepting the principle of priviledged access to our mental states (access-internalism), through some form of conscious awareness, intuition, introspection, does not imply that we cannot (in fact we must) exercise some self-control and criticism on our beliefs. The question r emains open as to the natur e of such a contr ol: is it something irreducibly normative and reflexive, or is such a normativity already present in terms of some metacognitiv e capacities at the lev el of nature itself? In which case, we would not have to distinguish a “reflexive” level from an “animal” level (Sosa) in order to have a “perspective” on our beliefs, but we should merely view epistemic normativity as being in continuity with (emerging from) nature (Peirce’s solution). But then we would have to view our belief-dispositions not only asstable habits but as involving the necessar y “habit-changes”—Peirce; cf. Aristotle’s distinction betw een “hexis” (stable habit) and “diathesis” (moving disposition)—entailed by the education of our “feelings of knowing” or “sentiment of rationality” (James, Peirce) in order for our dispositions to become virtues, hence to play their expected role in our practices of epistemic evaluations and ethical valuings 39

(Dewey’s distinction, which we have to make if we want to keep the insight that there is more value in knowledge than in justified true beliefs). In the same manner, not to accept the principle of an independent reality, totally external to our beliefs (see the criticism of metaphysicalealism r present both in Peirce and in P utnam), does not imply that it is not possible (indeed, it is necessary, if we want to explain the cooperation of the (tr uth-maker) world with our beliefs), either to maintain the causal strength of r eality upon our beliefs (Peirce’s Secondness and semiotic abductive realism applied to the analysis of per ception and opposed to a R eidian direct realistic or a Putnamian natural r ealistic approach); or to dev elop a form of r ealism enabling one to explain how, on the one hand, the real does constrain our beliefs, and on the other hand, is to be vie wed as the final opinion agreed upon by the scientific community, hence justifies our scientific method of fixing our beliefs in a warranted way (at the roots of Peirce’s scholastic and even Scotistic realism). 2) The principle of fallibilism is the second pragmatists principle that should be added to such constraints: it is closely allied with the presumption of the possibility of knowledge but also with a necessarily un-dogmatic definition of knowledge and an epistemic (and ev en ontological) radical indeterminism. But it is a fallibilism which may itself happen to be questioned and is constantly submitted to the r ules of scientifi c method and to the constraints of inquiry. But note that it is precisely such a fallibilism (which is consubstantial to pragmatism) which constitutes the ev er present risk of the sceptical drift (several times, indeed, the pragmatists come very close to scepticism, in a neo-P yrrhonian or dogmatic way). Contrar y to Hookway’s suggestion (2008b) that “fallibilism” is not really “disturbing” for Peirce, since it has the status of a mer e “abstract” possibility, such an alliance of “ fallibilism and anti-scepticism ” might w ell constitute “ the” insight of American pragmatism (P utnam), but also a genuine and constant threat to knowledge. This is why it seems advisable to bet on some form of weak foundationalism which might be looked for, along such lines as those pr oposed by Tyler Burge’s concept of “ perceptual entitlement”: our perceptions may not pr ovide us warrants nor justifi cations, however they entitle us or giv e us prima facie justifi cations to believe what we do believe, as Peirce tries to make clear in his analysis of perception through abduction12. 12. See Tiercelin 2005b, for a detailed account of Peirce’s views on abduction and perception.

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Although remaining within a basically standard model, such a pragmatist strategy about kno wledge would impose the r evision of some of our former views. Involving a naturalistic though not “naturalized” approach, it would tend to bring epistemology 1. closer to ethics: stress the need to interpret normative facts (without totally indulging into virtue epistemology); account for normativity, in terms of an emergence of norms (viewed as both stable and ev olutionary dispositions (habits and habit-changes) from nature, akin to Kant ’s model of a system of pr eformation of pur e reason); 2. back to the philosophy of mind and cognitiv e psychology: account for such mental states as both belief-dispositions and aff ective states as being constitutiv e of mental and epistemic agency; 3. closer to the philosophy of science: insist on experience and experimentation within the context of an inquir y ruled by the scientifi c method; 4. closer to the philosophy of language: the inquir y part of kno wledge stresses how our assertions aim at kno wledge (which works as their norm) within a pragmatist though limited contextualism; 5. closer to metaphysics, thr ough the need for a better understanding of the nature of dispositions (are they mental, physical, basic, super venient on categorical pr operties, mer ely functional), and of the r eal, if per ceptual entitlement may be vie wed as a prima facie justifi cation, constraining our beliefs, “ mimicking foundationalism”, how does perception hook into the world? I n what way does it inform us about the ontological furnitur e of the states of aff airs? In so doing, the new strategy would provide a decidedly anti-pyrrhonian model of agency and a guide to action, in accordance with the strong rejection of ethical neutrality of abstention condemned by James. This morning, when we woke up, we stopped dreaming (at least, we are entitled to believe so). The sun, like y esterday, had arisen, the ear th was under our feet. This is not infallibly certain, but it remains highly probable, until proven wrong. At any rate, it would bemeaningless to ask us to justify it or to pretend that we are in no way entitled to think it. Because we aim at truth, because we value knowledge more than mere justified and true belief, because we view ourselves as answerable and responsible (epistemic and mental) agents who are constrained by the real and commit themselves to their assertions, we presume (not only as a regulative but as a living hope) that knowledge is possible, and this is indeed suffi cient to dispose us to act.

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REFERENCES Brock, J. 1975. “Peirce’s Conception of Semiotic”, Semiotica, 14: 2, 124–141. — 1979. “Principal Themes in P eirce’s Logic of Vagueness”, in Peirce Studies, Lubbock, Texas, 41–50. — 1980. “Peirce’s anticipation of Game-theoretical Logic and Semantics”, in M. Herzfeld & M. Lehnart (eds.), Semiotics, Plenum Press, New York and London, 55–64. — 1981. “An Introduction to Peirce’s Theory of speech-acts”,Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society, vol. 17, 319–326. Dewey, J. 1938. Logic: The Theor y of Inquiry. Henry Holt, New York. Fogelin, R. (1994) Pyrrhonian Reflections on Knowledge and Justification. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Haack, S. 1997. “ ‘The Ethics of Belief ’ Reconsidered”, in L. E. Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of R. Chisholm, La Salle, Ill., Open Court, 120–44. Hilpinen, R. 1982. “On Peirce’s Theory of the Proposition: Peirce as a Precursor of Game-Theor etical Semantics”, The Monist 65, 182–8. — 1995. “Peirce on Language and Reference”, in Peirce and Contemporary Thought , K. L. Ketner(ed.), Fordham University Press, New York, 272–303. Hintikka, J. 1979. “Quantifiers in Logic and Q uantifiers in Natural Language”, in J. S aarinen (ed.), Game Theor etical Semantics, Reidel, Dordrecht, 27–47. “Quantifiers versus Quantification-theory”, ibid., 49–79. Hookway, C. 1985. Peirce. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. — 1990. Scepticism. London, Routledge. — 1993. “Mimicking Foundationalism: on Sentiment and Self-Control”, European Journal of Philosophy 1, 156–74. — 1994a. “Cognitive Virtues and E pistemic Evaluations”, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2, 211–27. — 1994b. “Naturalized Epistemology and Epistemic Evaluation”, Inquiry, Vol. 37, n°4, 465–85. — 1998. “Doubt, Aff ective States and the R egulation of I nquiry”, in C. M isak (ed.), Pragmatisms, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary volume 24, 203–26, reprinted as chapter ten of Hookway 2000, 246–264. — 1999a. “How to be a vir tue epistemologist”, reprinted in M. D ePaul & L. Zagzebski (eds.) Intellectual Virtue. Perspectives from Ethics and E pistemology, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2003, 111–134. — 1999b. “Questions of Context”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1–16. — 1999c. “Epistemic Norms and Theor etical Deliberation”, in Ratio vol. XII, 380–97. Reprinted in Normativity, J. Dancy (ed.) Oxford, Blackwell, 2000.

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— 2000. Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism, Themes from Peirce. Oxford, Clarendon Press. — 2001. “Epistemic Akrasia and E pistemic Virtue”, in A. F airweather and L. Zagzebski (eds.) Virtue Epistemology, Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility, Oxford University Press, 178–199. — 2002. “Emotions and Epistemic Evaluations”, in P. Carruthers, S. Stich and M. Siegel, (eds.) The Cognitive Basis of Science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 251–262. — 2003. “Affective States and E pistemic Immediacy”, Metaphilosophy, v ol.34, n°1–2, 78–96. — 2008a, to appear. “Epistemic Immediacy, Doubt and Anxiety: On the Role of Affective States in Epistemic Evaluation” in G. B run, U. Doguouglu and D. Kuenzle (eds.), Epistemology and the Emotions, Ashgate. — 2008b, to appear. “Peirce and Scepticism”, in J. Greco (ed.) The Contemporary Anthology of Scepticism, Blackwell, Oxford. James, W. 1979. The Will to B elieve, in The Works of William James (vol. 6), F. H. Burckhardt, E. Bo wers and I. K. Skrupskelis (eds.), Cambridge, H arvard University Press (17 vols.), 1975–88. McGinn, M. 2003. Reply to C. Hookway’s “Affective States and Epistemic Immediacy”, Metaphilosophy, vol.34, n°1–2, 96–101. Peirce, C. S. 1931–58. The Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce (CP). Ch. Hartshorne, P. Weiss & A. Burks (eds.), Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, cited by volume and paragraph numbers. — 1967. The Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of C.S. Peirce (Ms). R. Robin (ed.), Amherst, Mass., University of Massachusetts Press. — 1976. The New Elements of Mathematics (NEM). C. Eisele (ed.), Mouton, The Hague (4 vols.). — 1982. Writings of C.S. Peirce, a chronological edition (W). M. Fisch, Ch. Kloesel, E. C.Moore, D. D. Roberts (eds.), I ndiana University Press, Bloomington (6 vols.). Tiercelin, C. 1993a. La pensée-signe: études sur Peirce. Éditions Jacqueline Chambon, Nîmes. — 1993b. Peirce et le pragmatisme. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris. — 1997. “Peirce, on norms, ev olution and knowledge”, Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society, vol.33, n°1, 35–58. — 2005a. Le doute en question: parades pragmatistes au défi sceptique. Paris, éditions de l’Eclat. — 2005b. “Abduction and the Semiotics of Perception”, Semiotica, F. Merrell and J. Queiroz (eds.), 389–412. Williamson, T. (2000) Knowledge and Its Limits. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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Wittgenstein, L. 1969. On Certainty (OC). G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (eds.), Oxford, Blackwell. Wright, C. 2004. “Wittgensteinian Certainties”, in D. McManus (ed.), Wittgenstein and Skepticism, London, Routledge, 22–55.

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Grazer Philosophische Studien 77 (2008), 45–59.

IN WHAT SENSE IS KNOWLEDGE THE NORM OF ASSERTION? Pascal ENGEL Université de Genève Summary The knowledge account of assertion (KAA) is the view that assertion is governed by the norm that the speaker should know what s/he asserts. It is not the purpose of this ar ticle to examine all the criticisms nor to tr y to giv e a full defence of KAA, but only to defend it against the charge of being normatively incorrect. It has been objected that assertion is governed by other norms than knowledge, or by no norm at all. It seems to me, however, that a number of these criticisms are based on a number of misunderstandings of the notion of a norm and of the way it can regulated a given practice. Once we spell out in what sense knowledge can play a normative role in this context, the KAA appears much more plausible.

1. Preliminary formulations of the knowledge account The knowledge account of assertion (KAA), although it has probably been present within philosophy at least since the P yrrhonian sceptics 1, was introduced into contemporary analytic philosophy by G.E. Moore (1962), revived by Michael Slote (1979) and P eter Unger (1975) and Timothy Williamson (2000) 2. It has since r eceived as much appr oval as criticism. It consists in at least the following three claims: 1. Although it has, to my kno wledge, not been often r emarked, the P yrrhonian sceptic’s refusal to assent fully to pr opositions is based on the implicit r ecognition that kno wldedge is the norm of assertion. See Frede’s (1987) classical article. 2. The knowledge account sur faces also in some writings b y Ruth Marcus, such as her (1983), where she holds that to believ e that P implies that P is possible, and one ’s realisation that P is impossible leads to a withdrawall of one ’s claim to believe, and in appropriate conditions of one ’s having asser ted that P. In other wor ds, realisation that one does not kno w that P, since P cannot but be false when P is impossible, amounts to the r ealisation that one is not entitled to assert that P.

(i) There is a norm for the speech act of asser tion (ii) This norm is unique and constitutive of assertion (iii) This norm is that one must assert that P only if one knows that P Each of these claims can be contested. O ne can reject the idea that there is a norm for the practice of assertion: maybe there are no rules or norms for this practice, and just things that people say in various circumstances, which can all equally count as assertions. One can also reject the idea that if there is a norm it is unique and constitutiv e. There might be several kinds of norms, including ones which do not involve any epistemic position on the part of the asserter. And one can reject the knowledge norm itself, and propose a weaker one, while accepting that the norm of assertion is some epistemic status. The other ob vious candidates ar e the w eaker norms of truth and belief: (KT) One must assert that P only if P is true (KB) One must assert that P only if one believes that P or perhaps some higher condition than mere belief, alternatively: (KRB) One must assert that P only if one rationally believes that P (KWB) One must assert that P only if P is warranted (KPB) One must assert that P only if P is highly probable In this ar ticle, I will not r eally discuss the issue of whether one should defend (KT ) or one of the norms (KB), which all pr esuppose that the norm of asser tion inv olves some epistemic status, lo w or high, on the part of the speaker. I shall be mainly concerned with the sense in which either of these can be said to be a norm of assertion. For that, I shall also suppose that the norm for asser tion is at least as str ong as (KN) belo w. Even if we assume that (i)–(iii) are correct, there are, nevertheless, several formulations of (iii), which ar e not equiv alent. The most basic one says that an asser tion that P is corr ect if and only the speaker kno ws that P, hence obeys the prescription: (KN) One must: assert that P only if one knows that P This is Williamson’s (2000, 243) formulation. M oore’s o wn v ersion is 46

distinct: “By asserting that P, you imply, though y ou do not asser t, that you know that P” (Moore 1962, 277). (MKN) To assert that P is to imply that one knows that P Peter Unger’s formulation diff ers too: “ Asserting that something is so entails not just representing the thing as being so, but er presenting oneself as knowing that it is.” (Unger 1975, 256) (SPKN) To assert that P is to represent oneself as knowing that P Let us call this, with P agin (2006), the “ self-presentation account”. The self- presentation account is clearly the counterpart of similar claims which have been proposed for the belief account of assertion (KB). Thus Dummett has suggested: A man makes an assertion if he says something in such a manner as deliberately to convey the impression of saying it with the o verriding intention of saying something true (Dummett 1973, 300)

and Davidson similarly: What is understood [b y the hear er of an asser tion by a speaker] is that the speaker, if he has asserted something, has represented himself as believing it —as uttering a sentence he believes true, then. But it is not a convention, it is merely part of the analysis of what asser tion is. To assert is, among other things, to represent oneself as believing what one asserts”. (Davidson 1979)

The self-presentation analysis transposes this claim from belief to knowledge. As one sees, these formulations are not equivalent and their differences can generate a lot of ambiguities. In the first place it is not clear whether they are supposed to give a defining feature of assertion, or at least to give a necessary condition of it, as (KN) does, or whether they ar e giving the condition of a successful assertion. On the first reading, a statement which would not conform to the (KN) norm would fail to be an asser tion. On the second r eading, it might be an asser tion but a defectiv e one. I n the second place (KN) and the other two formulations (MKN) and (SPKN) differ in that the latter two do not require that the speaker actually knows that P, but only that he conv eys to his audience the belief that he does, whereas the former does r equire that the speaker actually kno ws that P, 47

and is compatible with the following: (KNB) One must: asser t that P only if one believ es that one kno ws that P There is at least one version of the self-presentation account (SPKN) which is clearly defectiv e, for r easons which hav e been clearly br ought up b y Peter Pagin (2006). Suppose that a speaker represents herself as knowing that P by simply saying (1) I hereby represent myself as knowing that P But an utterance of (1) is obviously not an assertion that P, for conveying to an audience, successfully or not, the belief that one kno ws that P cannot amount to asserting that P. When one asserts that P, what one says implies that P, and is incompatible with its falsity. (1), however, is compatible with the falsity of P. This is not simply because one may lie: one may commit oneself, through some sor t of act—for instance a statement befor e a tribunal, which legally ties one to the tr uth of P, without it being the case that P is actually true. Asserting that P is more than committing oneself to some audience, through some sort of social commitment. In other words, it is something different from assuring someone that P. It is saying that P with the aim of saying something true, and not simply saying something which one represents to others as tr ue, and that one believ es as true. An actor on the stage might, in this sense, represent himself as knowing that P without asser ting that P. For the same r eason, the self-pr esentation account does not wor k when the speaker is supposed to commit herself to the belief that P: (2) I hereby represent myself as believing that P is just as inadequate as (1) for the same r easons. The same goes for: (3) I hereby represent myself as committed to the truth that P which is no more an assertion that P than (1). 3 3. Pagin 2006. P agin dev elops in his 2004 a general strategy for assessing claims about speech acts.

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This may hav e to do with the r eason why M oore says that to asser t that P is not to assert that one knows that P, but only to imply it. But it remains to be seen in what sense there is such an implication in assertion. The inadequacy of the formulations (1), (2) and (3) does not rule out the self-presentation account in itself, since there may be more adequate formulations of it (I shall come back to that below). I shall however, assume first that the correct account is (KN). 2. Familiar objections to KAA Several kinds of arguments hav e been adv anced in fav our of (KN). The most familiar ones appeal to linguistic evidence. Asser ting that P invites the question “How do you know?” when the assertion is improper, or “You don’t know that”, when it is false. S imilarly asking the question whether P seems to imply that one ignores whether P. The point is that when a speaker asserts that P, and does not kno w that P, he can be criticised, or has to withdraw his asser tion. Similarly if y ou ask whether P while y ou already know that P, you have in some sense failed to ask a question, or have violated G rice’s maxim of quality . This linguistic evidence is not very compelling, though. In a number of contexts, utterances that P can elicit questions like: “What are your reasons for believing P?” or “Do you believe that?” which suggest that reasonable grounds for belief, or simply truth, are the pr oper presuppositions of asser tion. And some questions are just ir onical. For instance the follo wing dialogues make per fectly good sense: (4) “Lake Leman is polluted. ”—What ar e y our r easons to believ e this? (5) “Hillary Clinton will be the next president”—Do you believe this? (6) “Have you not received the Nobel prize yet?”—You are kidding! An argument based on Moore’s paradox has also been advanced in favour of KN. It consists in remarking that sentences like: (7) It is raining, but I do not know it are just as absur d as the familiar M oorean sentences such as “I t is raining but I don’t believe it” or “ I believ e it is raining but it ’s not”. Indeed 49

sentences like (7) are much more clearly absurd than these. But one may remark that: (7c) It is raining, but I do not have very good reasons for believing it. does not make sense either. So why should the presence of “know” in (7) make the difference? The lottery argument is perhaps the most discussed (Williamson 2000, 246–47). The point is that an assertion made only on the basis of a v ery high degree of belief can be straightforwardly rejected. In a fair lottery of 10 000 tickets where A has bought one ticket, if B says: “ Your ticket did not win”, A is entitled to asser t: “But you do not kno w that!” H ere too there is a defence in terms of rational belief . Someone could as well answer: “But you do not have enough grounds to believe this!” Another related argument appeals to the role of knowledge in practical reasoning. Hawthorne (2004) pr esents the follo wing piece of r easoning coming from an individual participating in a fair lottery: (1) (2) (3) (4)

My ticket will not win If I keep my ticket, I shall win nothing If I sell my ticket, I’ll get 10 pence Hence I must sell my ticket.

The reasoning is wrong, because the individual is not entitled to (1) in the first place, for his premise is not known. The point is that knowledge plays an indispensable r ole in practical r easoning. But here too it is not clear that rational belief could not be the appr opriate norm: we seem entitled to affi rm things of which w e are not absolutely cer tain in the sense of knowledge (Douven 2006). Other objections to (KN) concentrate on the many cir cumstances where assertion seems to be proper even when one does not know that P (Weiner 2005). They include cases of lying (a liar does not ev en believe what he says, hence does not know it) , ironical assertions, gossips where one merely “says” that P in the coffee house without asserting it seriously, cases of assertions about future events (“The next American president will be Barack Obama”) which we feel perfectly entitled to assert even though we do not kno w that they ar e true, cases of agents who ar e in a G ettier situation, where they ar e justifi ed to believ e something tr ue merely b y accident (“Nogot owns a Ford”, “This is a barn façade ”), or cases wher e 50

the cir cumstances allow us to asser t something for r easons which hav e nothing to do with any epistemic status. For instance, I may assert “That ’s your train!” in a cir cumstance where I am not sur e that it is y our train, although it is v ery important for you to take a train (if it w ere not your train, you would not be entitled to criticiz e me for not kno wing) (Williamson 2000, 256). Or I may say to you, when you are worried by a very serious problem: “That’s not a big deal ”, when I actually kno w that it’s a big deal. Another similar kind of objection inv olves situations where assertions are pr oper in the pr esence of other norms than pur ely epistemic ones. Jennifer Lackey (2007) has presented cases of what she calls “selfless assertions”, where a subject, for purely non epistemic reasons does not believe that P, but is awar e that P is w ell supported by epistemic reasons, hence is led to asser t that P, although he still does not believ e that P, hence does not kno w that P. She gives the case of a racist jur or who, because of his prejudices, is led to believ e that a black man is guilty although he recognises the racist origin of his pr ejudice and asser ts that the man is innocent, or the case of a cr eationist teacher who nev ertheless is able to recognise the scientifi c evidence against her religious beliefs and is led to assert evolutionist claims. According to Lackey, in those cases, the agent, qua asserter is not subject to criticism—she is actually subject to praise for having surmounted her previous beliefs—and offers an assertion which is both true and epistemically flawless, although she can be criticised for her beliefs, and because of these, she does not hav e knowledge. The upshot of these examples is that it is a mistake to require proper assertion to pass through the doxastic states of the asserter. Notice also that they are meant to be counterexamples both to KN and to KB (or one of its version such as KRB), hence to any account of assertion according to which the asserter has to occupy a certain epistemic status. It is not clear, however, that such cases are genuine counterexamples to KAA and to KN in particular. In the first place it is not clear that although the subjects have religious or racist beliefs which run counter their assertions, they do not make these asser tions on the basis of their evidence and of their kno wledge (of ev olutionary theory, of the innocence of the black man). I n the second place, it is not clear that these cases ar e not cases where someone accepts that P although he or she does not believ e that P. O ne can accept, for pragmatic or for non epistemic r easons of some kind (pr ofession, role), and hence asser t that P, without believing that P. At this point both the defender of KAA and its critic can hav e an 51

answer4. On the one hand, the defender of KAA will want to say that to assert that P on the basis of an act of acceptance is mer ely to simulate assertion, or giving a fake asser tion (not necessarily lying). O n the other hand, the critic of the KAA will insist that these cases count as genuine assertions, although the subject is not in the appropriate epistemic status required by KAA or KB (or one of its v ersions). We meet again here the ambiguity already noticed abo ve, betw een the claim that KAA states a norm for the correctness of assertions and the claim that it defines what an assertion is. The critic of KAA can claim that the case of selfless assertions, although they do not conform to the norm of corr ectness of asser tion, count as assertions nevertheless. At this point is becomes important to turn to the issue which is implicit from the beginning: in what sense is assertion subject to a norm? 3. Which norm do we follow in assertion? The objections above show that there is a strong disagreement on this point. Two problems have to be distinguished. The first one is whether knowledge (or for that matter some sort of high epistemic status) is the only norm of assertion. In other terms, are our reasons for asserting a given sentence only epistemic and are the reasons for our being criticized in our assertions? One of the main r easons adduced in fav our of the idea that kno wledge is the norm of asser tion by its defenders is that asser tions which ar e not made in presence of pr oper knowledge can be “ criticised”. But are our r easons to criticize an assertion only epistemic reasons? The second problem is the problem of the relationship between the norm and its application. Timothy Williamson addresses the first problem by replying to the kind of counterexamples mentioned in the previous section involving cases of assertion made in the absence of kno wledge or belief in the asserted sentence, such as lying, speaking non seriously or making “selfless”assertions: Such cases do not show that the knowledge rule is not the rule of assertion. They merely show that it can be o verridden by other norms not specifi c to assertion. The other norms do not giv e me warrant to asser t p, for to hav e such warrant is to satisfy the rule of assertion. (Williamson 2000, 256) 4. For the distinction between believing and accepting, see Cohen 1992, Engel 2000. Jennifer Lackey considers the case of pr ofessional assertions, of lies and other cases, but considers that they are clear violations of the norm knowledge of assertion.

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The problem is whether an asser tion can r emain an asser tion when it is uttered in the absence, or in the r elative unimportance, of the epistemic status of the sentence utter ed. Indeed the person who says “That ’s your train” intends to say this because there is an obvious cost in not asserting it, and because it is better in such cases to err on the side of pr udence. There is no doubt that we make assertions for reasons which can be practical. In many of these cases we make, as I noticed above, acts of pragmatic acceptance without belief or without knowledge. It is clear that there can be assertions made for such pragmatic reasons, just as there can be (pragmatic) reasons for wanting to believe distinct from (epistemic) reasons for believing. There is a clear sense in which a belief which is held for reasons which fall short of being epistemic—for instance a self deceptive belief or one which we aim to have to secure a form of comfor t—still counts as a belief, so why could not assertions which are made for reasons which fall short of being epistemic, or which happen to be epistemically w eak, fail to count as assertions? Commenting upon the example of “That’s your train” and of assertions out of Gettierised beliefs, Jennifer Lackey says: There is a clear sense in which speakers who assert reasonably believed falsehoods and Gettierized beliefs are not subject to criticism. F or the faultiness of the asser tions in such cases r esult fr om infelicitous cir cumstances, not from any sort of blameworthy behaviour on the part of the asserters.( Lackey 2007, 597)

But the issue is precisely this: what kind of blameworthiness is at stake here? In the case of selfless assertions, the speakers are not blameworthy because they make assertions which are, although epistemically defective, perfectly proper. In the same manner, the liar, the joker, the ironist or the man who wants to r eassure y ou b y saying “That’s no big deal ” can be praised or blamed for their assertions for reasons which are distinct from their being epistemically valuable or not valuable. There is no doubt that they make assertions. This is not the point at issue, and we can here remove the first ambiguity noticed in §1 above: the KAA does not say that it is a defining feature of asser tion (a necessar y and suffi cient condition) that it is go verned by the norm of knowledge. It is perfectly compatible with KAA that some assertions violate the norm, and that other norms or dimensions of evaluation of assertions come into play. But from the fact that such norms can come into play in a number of asser tions it does not follo w that the other norm, the KN (or for that matter the KB or KRB norms) ceases to operate. Compare again with the contrast between reasons to believe and 53

reasons for wanting to believe: the two can coexist or can confl ict within a subject (for instance in self-deception as it is usually characterised), but the fact that it can be in some cases rational in a pragmatic sense to hold a belief for which one has only v ery weak epistemic reasons or evidence does not show that the main standard of evaluation of a belief is not truth or evidence. Similarly the fact that one can praise or blame an asser tion in some cases for pragmatic reasons does not mean that the dimension of evaluation remains its epistemic status. One might object that this answer relies too much on a parallel between belief and assertion, and that it is not a norm of asser tion that it aims at truth or at knowledge contrary to the parallel claim about belief.5 Indeed it seems that in the case of asser tion, we are entitled to adopt whichev er norm w e intend to adopt, depending on our specifi c aims, hence that the norms her e are hypothetical imperativ es. In the case of belief , they may be categorical. But is it the case? Certainly the liar, the ironist or the friendly asserter do make asser tions, and they make them in the absence of knowledge (and of belief ) of what they asser t. But does it means that the point of their assertions was not truth or knowledge? If the objective of asserting that P were not to aim at one’s audience recognising the truth of P (or believing or knowing that P—the kind of epistemic norm is not her e in question—) assertions would be pointless, ev en for the liar. Certainly the ties betw een belief and tr uth or kno wledge are stronger than those between assertion and truth or knowledge, but it does not imply that they stop to operate in the case of assertion. The KN norm on assertion seems sometimes to be the view that our assertions should be so serious that only a Victorian clergyman—or an overly scrupulous scientist—could actually make assertions. But even the joker and the ir onist have to r ecognise, if only implicitly, the norm of truth and knowledge on assertion. 4. What it takes to obey the norm of assertion But it is pr ecisely at this point—and it is our second pr oblem with the very idea of a norm of asser tion—that we may ask: is not the norm KN too strong? Who will ever be able to obey it? Isn’t it actually so strong that 5. See e.g. Boghossian 2003 p. 39 : “The linguistic version of the normativity thesis, in contrast with its mentalistic version, has no plausibility whatsoever; and the reason for this is that it is not a norm of asser tion that we should aim at the tr uth, in the way in which it is a norm of belief to do so.” I have defended the normativity claim for belief in Engel 2005.

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no one will ever be able to apply it? This was in part what was involved in the lottery case: there are actually many propositions (perhaps most of our beliefs) upon which we can have only a very high degree of belief, and no certainty or knowledge: if it were required that we know them, we would be entitled to assert nothing, or most of our assertions would fail6. Hence the KN norm would be trivial. After all, ought is supposed to imply can. Bernard Williams says: It has been claimed that the norm attached to asser tion is kno wledge, in the sense that in asser ting that p one r epresents oneself as kno wing that p. The force of the claim might be thought to lie in the idea that one can be criticized for asserting what one does not kno w (“you should not hav e said this if you did not know”). This represents the criticism as a criticism of an assertor, but the speaker , after all, may not be in position himself to apply the norm effectively, because, at the point of asserting that p, he may reasonably think that he kno ws that p when he does not. I n such a case, it is not reasonable to criticize him, in the sense, at least ofblaming him for not having remained silent rather than speaking, or for not having said that p only in some qualified or doubtful way. It may be said, as it can in the case of many other rules, that he has broken the norm, but that in these circumstances he is not to blame for doing so . But then w e still need to kno w the supposed norm applies, and what the consequences of its obtaining ar e supposed to be. (Williams 2002, 76–77)

Here some defenders of the KAA account often use a distinction put forward by Keith DeRose between the primary and the secondary propriety or impropriety of a norm: As it happens with other rules, a kind of secondary propriety / impropriety will arise with respect to KN. While those who assert appropriately (with respect to this rule) in a primary sense will be those who actually obey it, a speaker who broke this rule in a blameless fashion (one who asserted something she didn’t know, but reasonably thought she did know, would in some secondary sense be asserting properly. (De Rose 2002, 180)

In other words, one could violate a norm of asser tion in the primar y 6. It is inter esting her e to note that this kind of objection has also been raised against normative accounts of belief in terms of tr uth: it is said that the norm for belief cannot be truth, since many truths cannot be believed and many truths are too trivial to be believable (see Boghossian op. cit., Engel 2005). But since the norm of belief for asser tion is arguably weaker than the knowledge norm KN, the charge of being too strong would apply even for the weaker norm (KB)

55

sense, while not violating it in the secondar y sense, hence not being open to criticism in the primar y sense; alternativ ely one can violate the norm in the secondary sense and not be criticisable in the primary sense. Some writers, like Matt Weiner (2005), use this distinction to defend the norm of truth (KT) for assertion against the KN norm: the speaker may not be able to r espect the str onger norm (KN), but he has to r espect in any case the weaker one to make a pr oper assertion: the only case wher e one is liable to criticism, on the vie w in question, is the case wher e the asserter has no gr ounds for believing the utter ed sentence to be tr ue (as in the paradoxical sounding (7c) above). Now I agree with Lackey (2007, 603–607) that this distinction is spurious, because ther e is only one way of violating a norm: simply b y not doing or believing what it pr escribes. The fact that I am unawar e that I cr ossed the yellow line does not make me less liable to receive the fine from the policeman who notices my bad driving behaviour. That may excuse me, but that does not change the fact that I have violated the rule. The fact that one is unaware of violating the norm does not change one’s status with respect to the norm. Williams’ objection and DeRose’s distinction, however, although they do no signal diff erent ways of r especting or violating a norm, point to another distinction which it is important to make, between the statement of a norm and its regulation. On the one hand a norm can be formulated in an objective sense, as a correctness condition of the form: Practice P is correct only if it has feature C or as an imperative: One must: perform practice P only if one satisfi es feature C. KT, KB and its variants, as well as KN as formulated above are formulated in terms of such correctness and imperative conditions. But on the other hand there are the conditions under which a norm is regulated, or its regulation conditions. These are the subjective conditions under which the correctness conditions are accessed by a given individual and are implemented in his psy chology.7 The former are independent of what the subject believes to be the norm, whereas the latter are so depen7. Although there are many ways of drawing this distinction, I was inspir ed by the way in which Shah (2003) formulates a similar distinction with respect to the norm of truth for belief. See Engel (2008).

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dent. Of course the two do not hav e to be completely independent, for otherwise one could not see how the norm is regulated, but they need not necessarily coincide. In the case of the kno wledge norm for asser tion, the relevant distinction is between (i) the question whether a subject’s assertions are conform to the norm, and (ii) whether the subject actually believ es that his or her assertions are conform to the norm. M any criticisms of the KN r ule actually assume that conformity to the norm implies (ii). This is why, as we saw abo ve in §1, a number of formulations consider that the norm KN has to include the correctness conditions that the subject “represents himself ” as knowing the content of the asser tion, or some other kind of “self-presentation”. As we saw, the self pr esentation account in the form (1) above, is clearly inadequate. B ut the KNB form, which Williamson (2000, 260) formulates as: (The BK rule): One must assert P only if one believes that one knows P is not obviously so inadequate. AsWilliamson notes, saying that the asserter has only to believe that he knows, or take himself to know, can explain many conservational phenomena which the KN account explains, without asking for a correctness condition as strong as knowing the content of the assertion. But Williamson rightly objects to it that ev en if we add to BK the condition that the belief has to be rational (for one might irrationally believe that one kno ws), one can rationally believ e oneself to kno w that P while not kno wing that P, hence violating the norm KN ( Williamson 2000, 262). I agree with him that the right move, for the defender of KN is not to r elativise it to a belief or to some mental attitude wher eby the subject represents to himself the norm. It is certainly diffi cult to say that an agent does not need in any sense to have access to a norm in or der to follo w it, and familiar attempts to reduce rules and norms to dispositions or rules to tacit knowledge of rules fail in this r espect. But it is not clear that one needs to actually believe anything about the norm in or der to apply it and to per form assertion. Someone who asserts a sentence in the futur e tense—“there will be a sea fight”—obviously does not know, and does not believe that he knows, the existence of the future state of affairs described by the sentence. Nevertheless he makes an asser tion, and he conforms himself to the KN norm. A liar obviously does not believ e what he asser ts, hence he does not kno w it. He nevertheless makes an asser tion. It does not matter her e whether 57

we say that the KN norm is a conv entional feature of assertion in a language in general, or whether it is a commitment of individual speakers. The point is that the norm is pr esupposed even when other norms, such as truthfulness, social norms, or other determinants of what we may want to say, are in place. The fact that the norm can be violated in many cases, overridden by other norms, or be applied in a very loose and relaxed way in many conv ersational cir cumstances does not sho w that the norm is not in place.8 Similarly the fact that it is most often (in most of the cases) very hard to implement does not show that it is not in place.We certainly sometimes do not hav e the slightest idea of what it would take for us to know the things that we assert. But this does not imply that we do not have any idea of what it would take to know anything. In so far as the standard of knowledge is with us in quite many cases (I would argue for many so called “Moorean” propositions, such as that ther e are trees in the garden across my window), it is enough for us to have it for most assertions. It is not because we cannot attain certain kinds of knowledge that the norm is not in place. In this sense, ought does not necessarily imply can. 5. Conclusion I have not, in this paper, tried to examine all the objections that hav e or can be raised against the KAA. Neither have I dealt with the issue whether another epistemic norm than knowledge (warrant or rational credibility) should not be preferred to KN. In fact most of the arguments that I have presented are compatible with the view that some high epistemic status, be it knowledge or not, is a norm of assertion, although there are some good reasons, which I hav e not giv en here, to pr efer the kno wledge account. My main point has consisted in objecting that the kno wledge norm is confused or inapplicable does not thr eaten the claims of KAA, once w e understand what it takes to be a norm of asser tion.9

8. I here concur completely with Williamson 2000, 258–59. 9. Versions of this paper have been read in 2007 in York, Nottingham, Geneva and Nancy. For their comments and encouragements I thank Tom Baldwin, Steven Barker, Berit Brogaard, Greg Currie, Igor Douven Julien Dutant, Frank Lihoreau, Kevin Mulligan, Paul Noordhof, Otto Bruun, Tom Stoneham. I am also indebted to the par ticipants of a wor kshop that I organised at the University of Paris IV in January 2006, Manuel Garcia Carpintero, David Owens, Maria Van der Schaar, and Peter Pagin, whose 2006 article inspired me much.

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REFERENCES Boghossian, P. 2003. “The Normativity of Content ”, Philosophical Issues, 13, 2003, 32–45. Cohen, J. 1992. An Essay on B elief and A cceptance. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Davidson, D. 1979. “Communication and Convention”, in Inquiries into Meaning and Interpretation, Oxford, Oxford University Press. De Rose, K. 2002. “ Assertion, Knowledge and Context ”, Philosophical Review, 111, 2, 167–203. Douven, I. 2006. “Assertion, Knowledge and Rational Credibility”, Philosophical Review, 115, 449–485. Dummett, M. 1973. Frege, Philosophy of Language. London, Duckworth. Engel, P. 2000. (ed.) Believing and accepting. Kluwer, Dordrecht. — 2005. “Truth and the Aim of B elief ”, in D. G illies (ed.) Laws and Models in Science, London, King’s college Publications. — 2008. “Belief and Normativity”, Disputatio, 23, 153–177. Frede, M. 1987. “The Skeptic’s Two Kinds of Assent and the Question of the Possibility of Knowledge”, in Essays in Ancient Philosophy, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Hawthorne, J. 2004. Knowledge and Lotteries. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Lackey, J. 2007. “Norms of Assertion”, Noûs 41, 594–626. Marcus, R. B. (1983) “Rationality and Believing the Impossible”, Journal of Philosophy, LXXX, 6, 321–338, repr. in her Modalities, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, 143–161. Moore, G. E. 1962. Common Place Book. C. Lewy (ed.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Pagin, P. 2004. “Is Assertion Social?”, Journal of Pragmatics 36, 833–859. — 2006. “ Knowledge Account of Assertion”, talk at the workshop “Assertion and Knowledge”, University Paris IV, January 2006, ne w version 2007 at http:// people.su.se/%7Eppagin/papers/astnorm.pdf. Shah, N. 2003. “How Truth Governs Belief”, Philosophical Review , 112, 447–82. Slote, M. A. 1979. “Assertion and Belief ”, in J. Dancy (ed.), Papers on Language and Logic, 177–90, Keele, Keele University Library. Unger, P. 1975. Ignorance. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Weiner, M. 2005. “M ust We Know What We Say? ” Philosophical Review,114, 227–251. Williams, B. 2002. Truth and Truthfulness. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Williamson T. 2000. Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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Grazer Philosophische Studien 77 (2008), 61–84.

KNOWLEDGE BY DEDUCTION Ian RUMFITT Birkbeck College, University of London Summary It seems beyond doubt that a thinker can come to kno w a conclusion by deducing it from premisses that he knows already, but philosophers have found it puzzling how a thinker could acquire knowledge in this way. Assuming a broadly externalist conception of kno wledge, I explain why judgements competently deduced from known premisses are themselves knowledgeable. Assuming an exclusionary conception of judgeable content, I further explain how such judgements can be informative. (According to the exclusionary conception, which I dev elop from some remarks in Ramsey , a judgement ’s content is giv en by the hither to live possibilities that it excludes or rules out.) I propose that the value of logic lies in its allowing us to combine diff erent sources of knowledge, so that we can learn things that w e could not learn fr om those sour ces individually. I conclude b y arguing that while single-conclusion logics possess that value, multiple-conclusion logics do not.

1. It seems beyond doubt that an individual can gain knowledge by exercising his capacity for deductive reasoning. Indeed, it seems clear that he can thereby gain knowledge that he could not attain without ex ercising that capacity. Suppose I am strapped to the chair in my study. From that chair, I cannot see the street below. I do, however, see that it is raining, and thus know that it is raining. Moreover I know, ultimately on inductive grounds, that if it is raining the street is wet. Accordingly, I reason as follows:

This paper benefited greatly from the discussion at the Nancy colloquium, and I am duly grateful to the organizers and participants. I also wish to thank Crispin Wright for stimulating correspondence about § 2. *

1.

It is raining 2. If it is raining, the street is wet So 3. The street is wet. The case appears to show how, by exercising a deductive capacity, a thinker can gain knowledge that he would not hav e been able to gain other wise. In the case described, I know that it is raining by virtue of seeing that it is raining. And I know through induction that if it is raining, the str eet is wet. By making the deduction, I thereby come to know that the street is wet. Ex hypothesi, though, I cannot see that the street is wet, so I cannot come to know the conclusion simply b y exercising my per ceptual capacities, which is how I came to kno w the fi rst premiss. Similarly, I cannot come to know the conclusion on inductive grounds alone, which is how I came to know the second premiss. Even in England, so pessimistic a view of the weather (or of the wastefulness of the water companies) would not yield knowledge. But by exercising my deductiv e capacity on the kno wledge that has been delivered by perception and induction, I can come to know something that I could not know on either of those bases severally. Obvious as this may seem, some philosophers hav e been puzzled b y how a thinker can gain knowledge by deduction. There are two problems here: first, how exercising a deductive capacity can yield knowledge; second, how it can yield knowledge that the thinker does not possess already. I take these in turn. The second problem is the harder one, but it can be solved, I argue, if we adopt a certain conception of a statement’s logically relevant content. I conclude with some remarks about the bearing of the resulting conception of logic on the choice between single-conclusion and multiple-conclusion logical systems. 2. It is not, I think, so har d to explain ho w applying a deductiv e capacity to premisses that one kno ws can yield kno wledge of the conclusion. A t least, this is not har d to explain on a br oadly externalist conception of knowledge, whereby a belief has the status of knowledge if it is produced by a method which r eliably yields the tr uth. Let us say that a thinker is logically capable if and only if he is disposed to deduce a conclusion from some premisses only when the conclusion r eally does follow from them, and to recognize at least some of the more obvious cases of one statement’s 62

following from others. Now suppose that a logically capable person knows the premisses of the argument in § 1, and deduces its conclusion fr om those premisses. B ecause he kno ws the two pr emisses, those pr emisses are true. And because the pr emisses are true, and the conclusion follo ws from them, the conclusion is also tr ue. Ex hypothesi, our thinker is logically capable, so he will deduce a conclusion fr om some pr emisses only if it really does follow from them. Accordingly, when a logically capable thinker deduces a conclusion from premisses he knows, the belief thereby formed will be tr ue, and will hav e been pr oduced in a way that r eliably yields true beliefs. That belief, then, has the status of knowledge, or something close to it. This explanation, it may be noted, does not presume that a logically capable thinker kno ws that ‘The street is wet’ follows from ‘It is raining’ together with ‘If it is raining then the str eet is wet’. Indeed, it does not presume that the thinker has the concept of consequence at all. Being able reliably to trace what follo ws from premisses comes fi rst, and is all we need to know things by deduction. Conceiving of statements or propositions as standing in relations of consequence comes later, when we start to do logic, if it comes at all. It may be objected that the explanation just pr oposed fails to explain how w e can know a conclusion deduced fr om kno wn pr emisses. The only operative ingredient in the explanation seems to be that the thinker makes a competent deduction from true premisses. But it will not be true in general that a thinker kno ws a conclusion that he has competently deduced from true premisses: he may not kno w the pr emisses. The last observation is of course corr ect, but it misses the point of the appeal to methods which r eliably yield the tr uth. The ‘method’ of forming beliefs that consists in only believing what logically follo ws from true beliefs is reliable, indeed infallible: for a false belief cannot follow from true beliefs. All the same, actually applying this ‘ method’ pr esumes some antecedent criterion for judging whether the pr emisses are true. So, in the fi rst instance, what master y of a deductiv e capacity pr ovides is not a ne w, reliable method for forming beliefs per se, but rather a means of combining reliable methods of belief-formation that one alr eady possesses so as to yield a ne w method which has a wider range than its components. O f course, the second-or der method may itself be applied to establish the truth of some statements—namely, the logical truths. But the value of our deductive capacities does not lie in their potential for establishing logical truths, which are merely a by-product of our interest in deductive consequence. Rather, it lies in their power to splice together reliable methods of 63

belief-formation to yield further such methods which have a wider range of application. First say it, then qualify it. The first qualification to the explanation just given is needed because risks can accumulate in the course of a deduction in such a way as to undermine kno wledge of the conclusion. A v ersion of the Paradox of the Preface provides a simple example of this. S uppose that an author has composed a book comprising only tr ue statements. Suppose too that the author knows each statement in the book to be true. Now a plausible necessary condition for knowing a statement to be true is that there should be very little risk, given the subject’s evidence, that the statement is false. Ex hypothesi, then, the author will meet this condition in respect of each individual statement in his book. However, he need not meet the condition in respect of the conjunctive statement that is reached by successively applying the logical r ule of ‘ and’-introduction to all the statements in the book. F or even when the risk of each conjunct ’s being false is low, the risk of the conjunction’s being false will be higher, and if the book contains sufficiently many statements the latter risk can be high enough to disqualify the author from knowing the truth of the conjunction, even though it is true and he believes it. This qualification, however, does not undermine the proposed explanation of how a logically capable thinker can come to know a conclusion by deducing it from premisses he already knows. For in many deductions—including short, simple deductions from few premisses—the accumulation of risks will not suffi ce to undermine knowledge. A second qualifi cation is needed on account of what epistemologists call ‘D retske cases’ (the one that follo ws is taken fr om D retske 1970, 1016ff. ). Thus, at the z oo one day, you correctly identify an animal that you see as a z ebra. So you know, it seems, that the animal befor e you is a zebra. That premiss logically entails that the animal befor e you is not a non-zebra carefully disguised to look like a z ebra. So a logically capable thinker may legitimately move from the premiss that the animal is a zebra to the conclusion that it is not a non-zebra carefully disguised to look like a zebra. Many philosophers, however, share Dretske’s intuition that you do not know the conclusion: in or der to know it, you would need evidence that excluded the possibility of the animal’s being a non-zebra disguised as a zebra, and your non-expert glance into the animal’s pen fails to provide such evidence. The precise analysis of these cases is a hotly contested topic in epistemology, but I think we can exclude them without compromising the value of the explanation proposed three paragraphs back. They present 64

a problem because the space of epistemically relevant possibilities expands between premiss and conclusion: in or der to kno w the conclusion, the subject has to exclude a possibility (that the animal is a non-z ebra disguised as a zebra) that is not relevant when we are assessing whether he knows the premiss. So we still have an explanation of how a logically capable thinker can come to know a conclusion by deducing it from known premisses in cases where there is no such expansion in the range of epistemicallyelevant r possibilities. Since many instances of deductiv e argument patently meet this condition, Dretske cases restrict, rather than undermine, the proposed explanation of the epistemic value of deduction. That explanation, though, depends crucially on the factivity of ‘knows’: this is what under writes the infer ence fr om the thinker ’s knowing the premisses to their being true. So it does not extend to explain why a logical capacity would enable a thinker to extend warrants or justifi cations for pr emisses that fall shor t of kno wledge to comparable warrants or justifications for conclusions that are correctly deduced from those premisses. Senses of ‘warrant’ or ‘justification’ that fall short of knowledge will precisely not be factive, so the corresponding arguments for them would break down. But this, I think, is as it should be. We certainly exercise our logical capacities to pr oduce inconclusive justifi cations for beliefs, and I am not suggesting that none of these exercises is legitimate. All the same, I see no reason to assume that the explanation of their legitimacy should be essentially the same as in the case of kno wledge. One straw in the wind here is the way that non-factive justifications, so far from combining to yield a new justification for a statement deducible from justifi ed premisses, frequently undermine each other . Thus, I may have warrant or justifi cation for the claim that Charles is no w in P aris: he always stays ther e at this time of y ear, I saw him heading off to the Eurostar, &c. I may also hav e warrant or justifi cation for the claim that Charles is not in Paris: I have just received a postcard, apparently sent by him from Berlin. If I notice the confl ict of evidence, I may make further investigations to resolve it. But what I will not do—what I cannot do—is to apply ‘and’-introduction to splice my various warrants or justifications together, so that collectiv ely they suppor t the claim that Charles both is and is not in Paris. For nothing at all warrants or justifies that. So far from combining to warrant the conjunctive conclusion, my justifications for the two premisses undermine each other . Cases of this kind ar e ubiquitous, and any explanation of why deduction is v aluable when applied to warrants that fall short of knowledge needs to accommodate them. Theories 65

that model strength of evidential support on conditional probabilities can, I think, accommodate them, while explaining why deductiv e reasoning is still valuable in the non-factive case. Perhaps other theories of non-factive warrant can too . Since my pr esent topic is knowledge by deduction, I cannot go into this matter here. But I hope to have said enough to cast doubt on the assumption that the v alue of deduction must be explained in essentially the same way for factive and non-factive warrants. 3. We have, then, an explanation of how deduction can yield knowledge. It is far harder to explain how it can yield new knowledge. The sense of puzzlement that pr ompts the demand for explanation has an ancient lineage, but fi nds its most powerful articulation in John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic. ‘We have now to inquire’, he wrote there, whether the syllogistic process, that of reasoning from generals to particulars, is, or is not a process of inference, [that is,] a process from the known to the unknown: a means of coming to a kno wledge of something which w e did not know before (Mill 1891, Book II, chap. iii, § 1).

The difficulty he discerns in an affi rmative answer does not arise only for properly syllogistic reasoning, but for watertight or conclusive deductions more generally: Logicians have been remarkably unanimous in their mode of answering this question. It is universally allowed that a syllogism is vicious if there is anything more in the conclusion than was assumed in the premises. But this is, in fact, to say that nothing ev er was, or can be, pr oved by syllogism which was not known, or assumed to be known, before (ibid.).

This leads Mill to conclude that ‘in every syllogism, considered as an argument to pr ove the conclusion, ther e is a petitio principii’ (II iii 2). The problem is then to reconcile this apparently ‘irrefragable’ doctrine with the indisputable fact that we do sometimes gain knowledge by deduction. Mill’s own solution was to deny that the premisses of a deductive inference are ever, strictly speaking, the gr ounds on which kno wledge of its conclusion rests. His leading example is the argument ‘All men are mortal. The Duke of Wellington is a man. Therefore the Duke of Wellington is mortal’—propounded at a time when the (fi rst) Duke of Wellington 66

was aliv e. ‘The pr oposition that the D uke of Wellington is mor tal’, he comments, ‘is evidently an infer ence; it is got at as a conclusion fr om something else; but do w e, in r eality, conclude it fr om the pr oposition, All men are mortal? I answer, No’ (II iii 3). A thinker may infer that the Duke of Wellington is mortal. But he will reach this conclusion ‘from the death of J ohn and Thomas, and ev ery other person w e ever heard of in whose case the experiment has been fairly tried ’ (ibid.). It is on kno wledge of such individual cases that knowledge of the Duke’s mortality will rest—not on knowledge that all men are mortal. In the present case, the inductive methods that take us fr om knowledge that J ohn and Thomas are mortal to kno wledge of the D uke’s mortality also enable us to infer more generally that all men are mortal. But ‘it is not in the…[deductive] descent from all men to the Duke of Wellington that the inference resides’ (ibid.). Rather: All inference is from particulars to particulars; General propositions are merely registers of such infer ences already made, and shor t formulae for making more; The major pr emise of a syllogism, consequently , is a formula of this description; and the conclusion is not an inference drawn from the formula, but an inference drawn according to the formula; the real logical antecedent or premise being the particular facts from which the general proposition was collected by induction (II iii 4).

Few today will be convinced by Mill’s own solution to his problem. As he says, it rests on the claim that every inference—every instance in which new knowledge is gained on the basis of old—mo ves from particulars to particulars. This claim ignores the fact that the acceptability of an inductiv e inference can depend on deductions from scientific theories. Mill’s theory also breaks down over cases in which the thinker who reaches the eventual conclusion of an apparent deductive inference does not himself possess the evidence that inductiv ely supports the r elevant generalization—as when I come to know by testimony that all men ar e mortal, and infer that the Duke of Wellington (whom I observe to be a man) is mortal. Mill recognizes that such cases pr esent prima facie diffi culties for his account, but insists that they can be accommodated, if we understand testimony to the truth of a general premiss to be a ‘memorandum’ which reminds us, that fr om evidence, more or less car efully weighed, it formerly appeared that a cer tain attribute might be inferr ed wherever we perceive a certain mark. The proposition, All men are mortal, for instance, shows that we have had experience from which we thought it followed that the attributes 67

connoted by the term ‘man’ are a mark of mortality. But when we conclude that the Duke of Wellington is mortal, we do not infer this from the memorandum, but from the former experience (II iii 4).

The difficulty here is obscured by Mill’s casual use of the pronoun ‘we’. Suppose you have observed John, Thomas, and the rest dying. On that evidence, you inductively infer that all men are mortal; and you tell me that all men are mortal. If I take y our word for this, and then learn that the D uke of Wellington is a man, I may infer that he is mortal. But my ground for that conclusion cannot be y our experiences which, in the case described, I do not share. Nor is my ground the claim that ther e is suffi cient evidence to infer the Duke’s mortality from his humanity. Unless there is such evidence, my belief that he is mor tal will fail to qualify as kno wledge. All the same, the claim that ther e is such evidence is not the gr ound for my infer ence. My ground is what you told me—namely, that all men are mortal. Inadequate as Mill’s solution is, he was right to be puzzled: the possibility of gaining knowledge by deduction calls for explanation. He was also right to reject some purported explanations as mere restatements of what needs to be explained. For example, it will not do to follow Bishop Whately and simply invoke a distinction between what is actually asserted and what is asserted ‘merely by implication’: the natur e of this distinction is what calls for explanation (op. cit., II iii 2). A full explanation of ho w we gain knowledge by deduction would be complicated. It would certainly include the point that Frege set out so clearly in ‘Booles rechnende Logik und die Begriffsschrift’ (Frege 1880–81): in making deductions using the rules of the calculus of relations, we are often led to form complex predicates that correspond to new concepts (new modes of classifying things), concepts that are only latent in our pr emisses. But while this obser vation helps to explain the conceptual fertility which is one source of our deductive capacities’ cognitive utility, it does not explain that utility in simpler cases—such as those discussed here—where no new concepts are introduced, and where the rules being applied are only those of the propositional calculus or the monadic fragment of the predicate calculus. 4. I wish to argue that a certain conception of a statement’s logically relevant content (its conceptual content , as I shall follo w Frege in calling it) can provide the missing explanation in these simpler cases. I n this section 68

and the next, I outline the theor y of content and the attendant account of consequence. In § 6, I apply the result to Mill’s problem. I take the relata of consequence, and the bearers of conceptual content, to be statements. But what do I mean by a statement? Let us consider those ordered pairs whose first element is a meaningful, indeed disambiguated, declarative type-sentence and whose second element is a possible context of utterance; by a possible context of utterance, I mean a determination of all the contextual features which can bear upon the truth or falsity of a declarative utterance. Some of these ordered pairs will be such that, were the declarative type-sentence that is the fi rst element uttered in the context that is the second element, a determinate pr oposition, or complete thought, would then be expressed. As I shall use the term, astatement is an ordered pair that meets this condition. Not every ordered pair of declarative type-sentence and possible context of utterance will qualify as a statement in this sense. For example, a pair whose first member is the sentence ‘You are ill’ will not count as a statement unless the context that is its second member supplies an addressee. On this definition, each statement belongs to a language, namely, the language of the sentence that is its first element. Furthermore, each statement possesses a sense or pr opositional content: this will be the thought that would be expressed by uttering the statement’s fi rst element (the declarativ e sentence) in the context that comprises its second element. It then makes sense to classify a statement as true or false simpliciter, according as that thought is true or false. Both assertions, and utterances made within the scope of suppositions, may be instances of statements: utterances of either kind will instantiate a giv en statement when the utterance is of the declarativ e sentence that is the statement’s first member, and is made in the context that is the statement ’s second member. It is, I admit, some what infelicitous to hav e unasserted statements, for ‘states’ often means ‘asserts’; however, alternative terms are more likely to mislead. The term ‘proposition’, for instance, would hav e served better (one may propound something without asserting it) were it not for the fact that so many philosophers already apply the term to what a declarative utterance expresses. In what does a statement’s conceptual content consist? In the relevant context of utterance, a number of possibilities will be taken to be open or ‘liv e’. I hold that a statement ’s content is giv en b y the hither to liv e possibilities that the statement is understood to ex clude. A statement is understood to exclude a possibility if anyone who understands the statement will know that, were the possibility to obtain, then an assertive use 69

of the statement would be incorr ect. A speaker who made such an assertion would have misled his hearers as to the facts. This gloss on exclusion relates the notion to assertive uses of statements, and the obtaining of an excluded possibility would not show a speaker who had made a suppositional use of the statement to hav e misled people. A speaker who makes a supposition, though, will be inviting his audience temporarily to set aside certain hitherto live possibilities, perhaps for the sake of argument, and the possibilities he is inviting his audience to set aside ar e precisely those that ar e excluded in the specifi ed sense. They are, in other wor ds, precisely the possibilities whose obtaining would show the corresponding assertion to be misleading. Thus, when I expr essly suppose ‘A city will never be built her e’, I temporarily set aside the same possibilities whose obtaining would render an assertive use of the same statement incorr ect. (Compare Dummett 1959.) It is because the v ery same possibilities ar e, respectively, outright excluded and temporarily set aside, that the assertion and the supposition shar e a conceptual content. I call this pr oposal the exclusionary theory of conceptual content. Why should we accept this theory? The best reason I know is suggested in the paper where the theory was first clearly propounded. In ‘Facts and propositions’, his pragmatist manifesto of 1927, F . P. Ramsey noted that any attitude of full belief or full disbelief can be defined in terms of the truth-possibilities of atomic propositions with which it agrees and disagrees. Thus, if we have n atomic propositions, with regard to their tr uth and falsity there are 2 n mutually exclusive possibilities, and a possible attitude is giv en by taking any set of these and saying that it is one of this set which is, in fact, realized, not one of the remainder. Thus to believe p or q is to express agreement with the possibilities p true and q true, p false and q true, p true and q false, and disagr eement with the r emaining possibility p false and q false. To say that feeling belief to wards a sentence expresses such an attitude is to say that it has certain causal properties which vary with the attitude, i.e. with which possibilities ar e knocked out and which, so to speak, are still left in. Very roughly the thinker will act in disr egard of the possibilities r ejected, but ho w to explain this accurately I do not kno w (Ramsey 1927, 45–46).

Ramsey’s last sentence suggests the follo wing general argument for an exclusionary theory of conceptual content. When trying to identify what assertive and suppositional instances of statements hav e in common, it makes little sense to focus on gr ounds, for while w e expect speakers to 70

have grounds for their assertions, we do not expect them to have grounds for their suppositions. Matters are diff erent, however, when we focus on statements’ consequences. Most assertions belong not in soliloquy but in colloquy, and are utterances in which the speaker tells a hearer something. And in most cases of telling, the speaker intends his audience to believ e what he says. F or this r eason, it makes sense to identify an asser tion’s content with that of the belief that would be inculcated in a hear er who understood and accepted the asser tion. Ramsey’s pragmatist insight is then that the content of this belief consists in the way that it bears on possible courses of future action. And it bears on futur e action by virtue of ‘knocking out’ possibilities of which a plan of action would other wise have to take account. S o, if an asser tion’s content is that of the corr esponding belief, and if belief in understood in Ramsey ’s pragmatist way, then the assertion’s content will be given by the hitherto live possibilities that it knocks out or ex cludes. We cannot give exactly the same analysis for suppositional instances of statements. For in expressly propounding a supposition, a speaker does not usually intend his hear er to believe what is thereby supposed. I n performing such a speech act, ho wever, he does intend his hearer temporarily to set aside certain possibilities, perhaps for the sake of seeing what follows when they are set aside. And an express supposition will share its content with an assertion if the possibilities thereby set aside are the same as those that someone who accepted the asser tion would thereby disregard when making plans. The exclusionary conception, then, giv es us a way of explaining ho w a supposition and an asser tion can share their logically r elevant content. So far as I can see, it is the only av ailable explanation that pr oceeds by identifying the particular features of the two speech acts in virtue of which their instances can be said to share contents. Although I cannot argue for this here, it seems to me that an explanation of this kind underlies others. Some philosophers will want to say that a supposition and an asser tion can share their logically relevant content by virtue of sharing their truthconditions. Perhaps so, but the Ramseyan explanation underlies this one, for the ex clusionary conception opens the way to a general account of what a statement’s truth-conditions are. Three features of my version of the exclusionary theory of content are worth noting at this stage. (1) According to the theory, a statement’s conceptual content is given by the possibilities that it isunderstood to exclude—not by the possibilities which are in fact inconsistent with its truth, or by the possibilities which 71

could be worked out to be inconsistent with its truth by pure deduction. I intend a statement’s conceptual content to be an aspect of its meaning; that is, I intend it to be something that someone who understands the statement will apprehend. Since the notions of content and understanding are coeval, the theory does not pretend to reduce conceptual content to putatively more primitive terms. It also respects the indeterminacy of content: even when a possibility is inconsistent with a statement, it will often be indeterminate whether the statement is understood to ex clude it. A theory of content must deal with such indeterminacy; it should not try to legislate it away. (2) The theory speaks of possibilities. By a possibility, I mean a way in which things are, or might be, or might hav e been, where the ‘might’ is that of broadly logical possibility. Robert Stalnaker uses a similar formula to explain his conception of a possible world, but he means a completely determinate way in which things—all things—might be. I do not; I mean only a way in which some things might be or might hav e been. S o my possibilities, which might also hav e been called possible states of aff airs, correspond to aspects of Stalnaker’s possible worlds. Stalnaker is a fellow exclusionist. ‘ To make an asser tion’, he writes, ‘is to r educe the context set [sc., the set of possible worlds r ecognized to be live options in a conversation] in a particular way, provided that there are no objections from the other par ticipants in the conv ersation. The particular way in which the context set is r educed is that all of the possible situations incompatible with what is said ar e eliminated’ (Stalnaker 1978, 86). B ut because he takes possibilities to be possible worlds, and neglects the distinction between what is incompatible with what is said and what it understood to be incompatible, S talnaker has gr eat tr ouble explaining why w e do not believe all the logical consequences of our beliefs. (F or his attempt to explain this, see S talnaker 1991, 1999a.) The present version of the exclusionary theory does not face this diffi culty. (3) At the root of the exclusionary theory is the idea that ‘our notions of right and wrong, for assertions as for actions, are asymmetrical, and it is the apparently negative notion which is primary’ (Dummett 1972, 22). For many simple statements, however, the possibility which we understand the statement to exclude is precisely the truth of its negation, and the possibility which we understand the negation to exclude is precisely the truth of the original statement. Thus, if we set aside v agueness, the possibility which we understand ‘It is raining’ to exclude is precisely that of its not raining, and the possibility which w e understand ‘I t is not raining ’ to 72

exclude is precisely that of its raining. For these statements, understanding a statement and understanding its negation are exercises of the same intellectual capacity: they are two sides of one coin. So these are statements to which we could attach the mediaev al tag Eadem est scientia oppositor um, and for them, the asymmetry Dummett describes becomes nugatory, or at least invisible. Not all statements are like this, however. Dummett’s own example of ‘A city will nev er be built her e’ (uttered in some r ural location) nicely brings out the intuitiv e difference. We understand the statement as excluding each of the follo wing possibilities: a city ’s being built here after one day, a city’s being built her e after two days, … I n each of these possibilities ‘A city will one day be built here’, which is the original statement’s negation, is tr ue. For were it the case that a city is built her e after a thousand days, ‘ A city will one day be built her e’ would be tr ue. All the same, it is unclear quite what possibilities the latter statement is understood to exclude. It is surely wrong to answer: the possibility that, at the end of time, a city will not hav e been built at the r elevant place. For if time continues indefi nitely, there will be no such thing as the end of time. I cannot ar ticulate here the principles that implicitly guide our intuitive judgements about this case. B ut the statement is one for which Dummett’s asymmetr y is r eal, so that the ex clusionary theor y off ers a distinctive account of its content. E xcessive concentration on statements that conform to eadem est scientia oppositor um has, I fear , led people to overlook the distinctiv e character of the ex clusionary theory of content, despite the powerful general considerations in its favour. 5. What account of consequence does the exclusionary theory yield? To answer this question we must fi rst say what it is for a statement to be true, and the natural exclusionary account is as follows: A statement is tr ue if and only if , for ev ery possibility that the statement is understood to exclude, something obtains which precludes the obtaining of that possibility. This explanation (and especially the component notion of pr eclusion) itself needs glossing. E ven in adv ance of that gloss, though, the explanation accounts for the validity of our initial inference. As we saw, ‘It is raining’ 73

is a simple statement which conforms to eadem est scientia oppositor um: the possibility the statement is understood to exclude is simply the possibility that it is not raining. So if this statement is true, something obtains which precludes the possibility that it is not raining. As for the conditional statement ‘If it is raining, the street is wet’, this is understood to exclude any possibility in which it is raining while the str eet is not wet. So if the conditional is true, something obtains which pr ecludes the possibility of its raining while the str eet is not w et. Suppose now that both of these statements are true, and consider the possibility that the street is not wet. If this possibility were to obtain, then either it would be the case that it is raining and the street is not wet, or it would be the case that it is not raining and the street is not wet. Now because the argument’s second premiss (the conditional) is tr ue, something obtains which pr ecludes the obtaining of the first of these sub-possibilities. And because the argument’s first premiss is tr ue, something obtains which pr ecludes the obtaining of the second of these sub-possibilites (which is a possibility in which it is not raining). So, for any possibility in which the street is not wet, something obtains which precludes the obtaining of that possibility. However, those possibilities are precisely what the conclusive statement ‘The street is wet’ is understood to exclude. So the condition for the truth of the conclusion is met, and we have an account of the inference’s validity: the truth of the premisses guarantees the truth of the conclusion. Some may find this account of the validity of modus ponens perplexing. In supposing that any possibility in which the street is not wet must either be a possibility in which the str eet is not wet and it is raining, or be one in which the street is not wet and it is not raining, the explanation r elies on an instance of ex cluded middle. Accordingly, it will extend to yield a general account of the v alidity of modus ponens only if ex cluded middle is taken to be a logical law. But, it may be observed, intuitionist logicians adhere to modus ponens unrestrictedly while accepting only a r estricted version of ex cluded middle. The obser vation is corr ect, but all it sho ws is that an intuitionist logician cannot accept the ex clusionary theor y of content. The intuitionist will have to give a very different account of why modus ponens is v alid, as indeed will a classical logician who r ejects the exclusionary theory of conceptual content. That, however, does not detract from the interest the above account of modus ponens has for a classical logician who accepts the theor y. For, as I now argue, the account pr ovides a solution to Mill’s problem.

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6. Mill’s problem concerns knowledge, not truth. How does the ex clusionary theory help to explain the possibility of a thinker’s gaining knowledge through a simple deduction? Let us revert to our original case and suppose that a thinker knows (by seeing) that it is raining. Then he will hav e per ceptual knowledge that rules out any possibility in which it is not raining. S uppose too that he knows that the street is wet if it is raining. Then he will have knowledge (inductive knowledge in this case) that rules out any possibility in which it is raining and the str eet is not w et. Because any possibility in which the street is not wet is either a possibility in which it is raining or one in which it is not, any possibility in which the str eet is not wet is ruled out by something he kno ws. So we can agr ee with M ill that a thinker who knows the premisses of our argument is in a position to know the conclusion: for any possibility that the conclusion is understood to ex clude, he knows something that pr ecludes the obtaining of that possibility . The knowledge our thinker possesses by virtue of knowing the premisses already excludes all the possibilities that need to be excluded in order to establish the conclusion. Moreover, Mill is right that this will always be tr ue of a deductively watertight inference. However, w e are now in a position to explain why the thinker may not actually kno w the conclusion. I n order to kno w that, he has to do some conceptual wor k in or der to see that each possibility ex cluded b y the conclusion has alr eady been ex cluded by the pr emisses. For he will only see that the pr emisses jointly establish the conclusion if he hits on a way of partitioning the possibilities that the conclusion excludes which makes it manifest that all these possibilities ar e already excluded by the premisses. In the present case, this is achieved by the simple partitioning of cases in which the str eet is not w et into cases in which it is not w et and it is not raining, and cases in which it is not w et and it is raining. A thinker’s deductive capacity rests on his ability to fi nd suitable partitions of this kind, and this ability goes bey ond anything that is strictly implicated in his kno wledge of the pr emisses. So although ther e is a sense in which a sound argument ’s conclusion is contained in its pr emisses, and although knowledge of the pr emisses puts us in a position to kno w the conclusion, actual kno wledge of the conclusion need not be contained in knowledge of the premisses. We need to find the appropriate partition of the excluded cases. Deductive rules are, in eff ect, rules for doing this. 75

That is enough for a deductive capacity to be epistemically useful even in these simple cases. The analysis also makes it clear ho w some sour ces of kno wledge can collectively establish a conclusion that none of them establishes b y itself. The possibility that the street is not wet is not ruled out by knowledge that it is raining: for there may be circumstances in which it rains without the street’s getting wet. Neither is the possibility that the street is not wet ruled out by the knowledge that the str eet is wet when it rains: it may not be raining. But the partition of possible cases shows that each case in which the street is not wet is excluded by one source of knowledge or the other. This shows how we should individuate the premisses of arguments: namely, by reference to the sour ces of the pr oponent’s knowledge of them. P hilosophers and logicians sometimes write as though it makes no difference whether an argument ’s premisses are treated separately or amalgamated into a conjunction. Thus, in the famous passage in which he appropriated the term ‘entails’ from the lawyers, we fi nd G. E. Moore writing casually about ‘the sense in which the conclusion of a syllogism in Barbara follows from the two pr emisses, taken as one conjunctiv e pr oposition’ (Moore 1922, 291). B ut it does make a diff erence, ev en over arguments with finitely many premisses. Since a deductive capacity’s epistemic power lies in its ability to combine knowledge from various sources to yield knowledge that would not be obtainable without it, an accurate r epresentation of one of its ex ercises must present as distinct premisses the deliverances of different sources of knowledge—as they may be, perception, memory, testimony, induction, abduction, or the results of previous deductions. The two premisses of a syllogism in Barbara may easily be grounded in different sources of knowledge (induction and testimony, perhaps). A thinker may apply ‘and’-introduction to the premisses and thereby reach a conjunctive conclusion. But in doing so, he will be ex ercising (albeit very gently) his capacity for deduction. The present theory explains, indeed, how a thinker may gain knowledge via a syllogism in Barbara. The possibilities that the conclusion ‘All As are C ’ is understood to exclude comprise all possible states of affairs in which some A is not C. Let us then consider an arbitrary such possibility, that in which a particular A object—call it a—is not C. Now any such possibility will either be a possibility in which a is B but not C, or it will be one in which a is neither B nor C. Consider first any possibility of the first kind. Such a possibility will be one in which someB is not C. The second premiss of Barbara (‘All Bs are C ’) is understood to ex clude any such possibility, 76

and thus excludes all possibilities of the fi rst kind. As for any possibility of the second kind, it will be a possibility in which some A is not B. The first premiss of the argument (‘All As are B’) is understood to exclude any such possibility, and thus excludes all possibilities of the second kind. As before, then, we can say the following. (1) Any instance of Barbara is valid: any possibility that the conclusion is understood to exclude is excluded by the truth of the premisses. (2) A thinker who kno ws the premisses of an instance of Barbara is in a position to know its conclusion: for any possibility that the conclusion is understood to exclude, he knows something that precludes its obtaining. (3) All the same, such a thinker need not actually know the conclusion. The conceptual work needed to fi nd the right way of partitioning the class of possibilities ex cluded by the conclusion goes beyond what is required to know the premisses. Minimal as that work is in the present case, the necessity for it is enough to explain how a thinker can gain knowledge by making the deduction. As before, the explanation assumes excluded middle in supposing that each possibility in which some A is not C is either one in which some A which is B is not C or one in which some A which is not B is not C. 7. Our analysis bears, I think, on the v exed question of whether systems of multiple-conclusion logic have the same status as the more familiar singleconclusion calculi. We may agree that in some areas of our intellectual economy, multipleconclusion consequence relations can play rôles recognizably akin to those played by single-conclusion consequence relations. An important example is the way that consequence relations constrain combinations of acceptance and rejection of statements. The mark of an attitude of acceptance, as I shall use the term, is that a thinker who bears such an attitude to a statement will thereby be mistaken unless the statement to which he bears it is true. Truth is thus the norm for acceptance. Belief, plainly, is one such attitude, but there are others—notably the kind of ‘ acceptance’ which some philosophers of science say is the proper attitude to adopt towards currently well-confirmed scientific theories, given the strong ‘pessimistic’ inductive evidence that those theories will eventually be refuted. It will be clear from this that the relevant notion of being mistaken is being mistaken as to the facts. A thinker may be mistaken in this sense even though his acceptance 77

of a statement is in no way irrational, nor even epistemically irresponsible. Similarly, the mark of an attitude of rejection is that a thinker who bears such an attitude to a statement will thereby be mistaken unless the statement to which he bears it is untrue. Just as belief is a paradigm attitude of acceptance, so disbelief is a paradigm attitude of rejection. And just as we express acceptance of a statement b y asserting it, so w e express rejection of a statement by denying it. This latter speech act may be performed, for example, by answering ‘no’ to the corresponding yes-or-no question. Part of the interest of single-conclusion consequence relations certainly lies in the way they bear on combinations of instances of acceptance and rejection. That bearing is partly captured in the following principle: (N) If a statement B follows from a statement A, then a thinker who accepts A and rejects B will be making at least one mistake as to the facts. If B follows from A, then a certain combination of acceptance and rejection—viz. accepting A and rejecting B—will involve at least one mistake as to the facts. (It is a further question how one tries to correct this mistake.) Indeed, giv en the glosses placed on ‘ accept’ and ‘r eject’, principle ( N ) admits of proof in a classical metalogic. For suppose that B follows from A. Then we certainly have that if A is actually tr ue then so is B. Given a classical metalogic, it follo ws from this that either A is not tr ue or B is true. Now if A is not tr ue, then any acceptance of A is mistaken. And if B is true then any rejection of B is mistaken. Either way, then, a thinker who both accepts A and rejects B will be making a mistake. But that is just what (N ) says. This proof of (N), it may be noted, requires only that either B is actually tr ue or A is actually untr ue, given that B follows from A. It does not exploit any necessity there may be in the way B’s truth depends on A’s. So the proof of (N) goes through even for the weakest consequence relation—the relation of Philonian consequence, in which A stands to B except when A is actually true and B is actually untrue.1 1. What of the conv erse of (N)? If, in the specifi ed senses, it is a mistake to accept A and reject B, will B follow from A? The answer is ‘no’; a version of Moore’s paradox provides a counterexample. A thinker who accepts that it is raining but denies that he accepts that it is raining will be making a mistake as to the facts. B ut the statement ‘He accepts that it is raining’ is not a consequence of the statement ‘It is raining’. It may not even be a Philonian consequence: we may suppose that it is in fact raining, but that no one accepts that it is. This sort of case is a problem for those who seek to explicate consequence in normativ e terms, but no such pr oject is contemplated here.

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Principle (N ), and its proof, extend straightforwardly to the case of multiple premisses. If B follows from A1,…, An then a thinker who accepts all the Ai and rejects B will be making at least one mistake as to the facts. What is striking, however, is that the principle, and the proof, also extend without strain to yield an account of the force of instances of multiple-conclusion consequence. Multiple-conclusion consequence obtains between two sets of statements X and Y when it is impossible for all the members ofX to be true without at least one member ofY ’s being true. An argument parallel to the proof of (N ) shows that if a setY is a multiple-conclusion consequence of a set X then a thinker who accepts all the members of X while rejecting all the members of Y must be making at least one mistake. This result has signifi cance for the enterprise of multiple-conclusion logic. The rarity, to the point of extinction, of naturally occurring multiple-conclusion arguments has always been the r eason why mainstr eam logicians have dismissed multiple-conclusion logic as little mor e than a curiosity. (See e.g. Tennant 1997, 320.) And attempts b y enthusiasts to alleviate the embarrassment her e have often ended up compounding it. In the introduction to their textbook on the subject, Shoesmith and Smiley concede that multiple-conclusion pr oofs can scarcely be said to form part of the ev eryday repertoire of mathematics. ‘Perhaps the nearest one comes to them’, they go on, ‘is in proof by cases, where one argues “suppose A1 … then B; …; suppose Am … then B; but A1 › … › Am, so B”. A diagrammatic r epresentation of this argument exhibits the do wnward branching which we shall see is typical of formalised multiple-conclusion proofs … But the ordinary proof by cases is at best a degenerate form of multiple-conclusion argument, for the diff erent conclusions ar e all the same (in our example they are all instances of the same formulaB)’ (Shoesmith and Smiley 1978, 4–5). ‘At best degenerate’, though, hardly says it. I do not know how the word ‘multiple’ is used in Cambridge, but in the rest of the E nglish-speaking world it is understood to mean ‘ more than one’. So an example of an argument in which all the conclusions (sic) are identical provides little justifi cation for taking multiple-conclusion logic seriously. But since this is all that S hoesmith and Smiley provide by way of a positive case for deeming their system to be a branch of logic, readers of their book may be forgiv en for closing it with a sigh on r eaching p. 5 of the introduction. Our discussion suggests a better justifi cation for their subject. Even if an instance of multiple-conclusion consequence yields no direct appraisal of any naturally occurring argument, it bears on the evaluation of certain 79

combinations of acceptances and r ejections in a way that r ecognizably generalizes (N ). Seen from this angle, then, ther e seems to be no good reason to privilege multiple acceptances o ver multiple r ejections. Let us grant that there are no naturally occurring multiple-conclusion arguments or proofs. If logic were primarily the theory of sound argument or proof, that would matter. But, it might be claimed, its import lies in the way in which it constrains combinations of acceptances and r ejections. On this view, there is no warrant for a lopsided r estriction of the conclusion sets to singletons. I think that this is the best case one can make for multiple-conclusion logic.2 Here, though, the best is not good enough. The basic problem with the defence is that ( N ) does not capture anything like the full force of single-conclusion consequence. It says that when B follows from A, a thinker who accepts A and rejects B will be making a mistake. So he will. But—just to take one example among many—the principle says nothing about the case of someone who accepts A, who knows that B follows from A, but who r efuses to accept B. A thinker who is in this position need not be making any mistake as to the facts. But the force of single-conclusion consequence is still eluding him. This is why we get irritated when we encounter such thinkers in our seminars. (‘What do you mean, you refuse to accept B? You continue to adhere to A, and I’ve shown you that B follows from A.’) Yet this aspect of the for ce of consequence does not transfer to the multiple-conclusion case. A thinker who accepts all the statements in a set X, who knows that a set Y is a multiple-conclusion consequence of set X, but who refuses to accept any statement in Y need not be making any mistake. Of course, he will be making a mistake if he refuses to accept the claim that some member of Y is true. But that point is grist to the mill of sceptics about multiple-conclusion logic. Yet again, they will say, we can only understand an instance of multiple-conclusion consequence as an instance of single-conclusion consequence in which the conclusion is a disjunctive or existentially quantifi ed claim.3 2. Something like this case for multiple conclusions is pr esented in R estall 2005. B ut he overplays his hand in suggesting that ‘ Y is a multiple-conclusion consequence of X ’ can be explained as meaning ‘The mental state of accepting all of X and rejecting all of Y would be selfdefeating’. The mental state that consists of accepting that there will never be sufficient grounds for accepting or rejecting ‘There is a god’, while rejecting that very statement, is self-defeating. But ‘There is a god’ is in no sense a consequence of ‘There will never be suffi cient grounds for accepting or rejecting “There is a god”’. 3. A cognate problem confronts Allan Gibbard’s attempt to extend the notion of validity to practical arguments—arguments whose conclusions are decisions rather than the bare acceptance

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The analysis of the previous section brings out, indeed, how impoverished a conception of the force of consequence (N ) and its generalizations afford. Those generalizations r ecord a priori constraints on combinations of acceptances and r ejections, and it is of some inter est to hav e rules which yield such constraints. B ut constraints of that kind ar e only a small par t of what makes single-conclusion logic impor tant. As w e have seen, its r ules ar e also of inter est because, b y follo wing them, a thinker can combine diff erent sour ces of kno wledge to come to kno w things that those sour ces do not establish sev erally. B ut this splicing together of diff erent sour ces of kno wledge to yield ne w pr opositional knowledge presumes many premisses but only one conclusion. The epistemic importance of that splicing justifies logic’s traditional focus on laws governing consequence r elations that r elate many pr emisses to a single conclusion. It is important to settle this matter, for the differences between multipleconclusion and single-conclusion logical systems r un deep. In particular, the pressure exerted by certain logical paradoxes is directed very differently in single-conclusion and multiple-conclusion frame works. Ian Hacking (1979, 292–3) draws our attention to the seemingly ‘ magical fact’ that the same operational r ules yield intuitionist logic in their single-conclusion form and classical logic in their multiple-conclusion form. But this is just one illustration of the way the str uctural rules of a multiple-conclusion calculus bear far more of the deductive weight than do the analogous rules in a single-conclusion system, and hence come mor e into contention in disputes between rival logical schools. An even more striking illustration of this concerns the multiple-conclusion cut rule, which Shoesmith and Smiley formulate as follows:

of statements. His leading example is Sherlock Holmes’s reasoning: ‘Either packing is now the thing to do, or by now it’s too late to catch the train anyway. It’s not even now too late to catch the train. Therefore packing is now the thing to do.’ ‘We can see’, Gibbard writes, ‘what makes Holmes’s practical argument valid. It took the form: F or P, not F, therefore P. An argument of this form is valid, even if to accept P is to come to a decision. To accept the premises and reject the conclusion would be to rule out every way that Holmes could become opinionated factually and fully decided in his hyperplan’—i.e., could come to have a opinion on every question of fact and to have made a decision about ev ery question of what to do (G ibbard 2003, 59). Holmes would indeed be inconsistent if he accepted the practical argument ’s premisses and rejected its conclusion. But there remains a gap betw een rejecting the r ejection of a practical conclusion and accepting it, so Gibbard does not capture the sense in which a successful deduction for ces one to accept its conclusion.

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(Multiple-conclusion cut) If there exists a set of statements Z such that X, Z1 : Z2, Y for each par tition of Z, then X : Y (op. cit., 29). (A partition of Z is an or dered pair such that Z1 ‰ Z2 = Z and Z1 ˆ Z2 = ‡.) Now in the envisaged justifi cation of multiple-conclusion logic, all that matter ed was that the r elevant ‘logical’ possibilities should include the actual circumstances. For that was enough to ensure that (N) and its generalizations ar e tr ue. Accordingly, one of the multiple-conclusion consequence r elations to which the laws of multiple-conclusion logic apply must be the r elation in which the only r elevant possibilities are actual. This will be the material, or P hilonian, multiple-conclusion consequence relation B, which obtains betw een a set of pr emisses X and a set of conclusions Y when either at least one member of X is not true or at least one member of Y is true. Thus the negation H of this relation will obtain between X and Y when each member of X is true but no member of Y is true. Instantiating the schematic ‘:’ in (Multiple-conclusion cut) with this Philonian relationship and contraposing, we reach (Philonian cut) If X H Y then for every set Z of statements, there exists a partition of Z such that X, Z1 H Z2, Y. The observation I wish to make is that (Philonian cut) contains a strong semantical assumption which goes far bey ond the transitivity of consequence. This comes out most clearly if w e apply the r ule in a language with vague predicates: anyone who wishes to deny that v ague predicates possess sharp boundaries or cut-offpoints is forced to deny (Philonian cut) and hence to deny the str uctural rule (Multiple-conclusion cut) of which it is a contraposed instance. To see this, consider a sequence a1, …, a100 of colour samples which range gradually fr om a1, which is clearly red, to a100, which is clearly orange and hence clearly not r ed. And consider the corresponding sequence of statements P1, …, P100 in which Pi predicates redness of ai . Let us then instantiate (Philonian cut) by taking the set X to be the singleton {P1} and Y to be the singleton {P100}. The case has been constructed so that P1 is true and P100 is not true, so we certainly have P1 H P100. By (Philonian cut), then, we infer that For every set Z of statements, there exists a partition of Z such that P1, Z1 H Z2, P100. 82

In par ticular, then, ther e must be a par tition < Z 1, Z2> of the set {P2, …, P99} such that P1, Z1 H Z2, P100. That is to say, there must be a partition of the set {P2, …, P99} such that all the members of Z1 are actually true while none of the members ofZ2 is. Now clearly the only partition that could possibly have this property is one where Z1 = {P2, …, Pk } and Z2 = { Pk +1, …, P99} for some integer k between 2 and 98. S o we are committed to the existence of a k for which P1, …, Pk H Pk+1, …, P100. But that is to say: we are committed to the existence of a k such that each statement up to and including Pk in the sequ ence is true, while no statement after Pk is true. We are committed, in other words, to a sharp cut-off point in the tr uth-values of the Pi s, and hence a sharp cut-off point in the redness of the ai s. So anyone who wishes to deny that there is such a cut-off point must deny (Multiple-conclusion cut). The moral I draw fr om this is that the content of ( Multiple-conclusion cut) includes much mor e than the transitivity of consequence. The concentration of logical po wer in the str uctural rules is characteristic of multiple-conclusion systems, which may be likened to those high-po wered sports cars whose engines need to be taken apar t and rebuilt almost from scratch if one is to make ev en a minor adjustment to them: fun to drive, but a nightmar e to maintain. B ut we have found r eason to leav e multiple-conclusion logics to the boy racers, and focus on the single-conclusion rules, by following which we can splice together the deliv erances of various sources of kno wledge to come to kno w things that w e could not know otherwise.

REFERENCES Dretske, F. I. 1970. ‘E pistemic operators’. The Journal of P hilosophy 67, 1007– 23. Dummett, M. A. E. 1959. ‘Truth’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59, 141–62. Page references to the reprint in Dummett 1978, 1–19. — 1972. ‘Postscript (1972) to “Truth”’. In J. M. E. Moravcsik, ed., Logic and Philosophy for Linguists: a Book of R eadings (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), 200–5. Page references to the reprint in Dummett 1978, 19–22. — 1978. Truth and Other Enigmas. London: Duckworth. Frege, F. L. G. 1880–81. ‘Booles r echnende Logik und die B egriffsschrift’. In Frege, ed. H. Hermes et al., Nachgelassene Schriften (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1969), 9–52. 83

Gibbard, A. F. 2003. Thinking How to Live. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hacking, I. M. 1979. ‘What is logic?’ The Journal of Philosophy 76, 285–319. Mill, J. S. 1891. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, 8th edition. London: Longman. Moore, G. E. 1922. Philosophical Studies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ramsey, F. P. 1927. ‘Facts and propositions’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volumes 7, 153–70. P age references to the r eprint in Ramsey 1990, 34–51. — 1990. Philosophical Papers, ed. D.H. Mellor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Restall, G. 2005. ‘Multiple conclusions’. In P. Hajek et al., eds., Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress (London: King’s College Publications), 189–205. Shoesmith, D. J. and T. J. Smiley. 1978. Multiple Conclusion Logic . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stalnaker, R. C. 1978. ‘Assertion’. Syntax and Semantics 9, 315–332. P age references to the reprint in Stalnaker 1999b, 78–95. — 1991. ‘The problem of logical omniscience, I’.Synthèse 89, 425–440. Reprinted in Stalnaker 1999b, 241–54. — 1999a. ‘The problem of logical omniscience, II’. In Stalnaker 1999b, 255–73. — 1999b. Context and Content: E ssays on I ntentionality in S peech and Thought . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tennant, N.W. 1997. The Taming of the True. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Grazer Philosophische Studien 77 (2008), 85–125.

QUESTION-EMBEDDING AND FACTIVITY Paul EGRÉ Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris Summary Attitude verbs fall in diff erent categories depending on the kind of sentential complements which they can embed. I n English, a v erb like know takes both declarative and interrogative complements. By contrast, believe takes only declarative complements and wonder takes only interrogative complements. The present paper examines the hypothesis, originally put forward by Hintikka (1975), that the only verbs that can take both that-complements and whether-complements are the factiv e verbs. I argue that at least one half of the hypothesis is empirically correct, namely that all v eridical attitude v erbs taking that-complements take whether-complements. I distinguish veridical verbs from factive verbs, and present one way of deriving the generalization. Counterexamples to both directions of the factivity hypothesis ar e discussed, in particular the case of emotive factive verbs like regret, and the case of non-veridical verbs that licence whethercomplements, in par ticular tell, guess, decide and agree. Alternativ e accounts are discussed along the way, in particular Zuber (1982), Ginzburg (1995) and Saebø (2007).

1. Introduction: the factivity hypothesis Attitude verbs in English fall in different categories depending on the kind of sentential complements which they can embed. In English, a verb like know takes both declarative and interrogative complements. By contrast, a verb like believe takes only declarative complements. A verb like wonder, on the other hand, takes only interrogative complements: (1)

a. Pierre knows that it is raining b. Pierre believes that it is raining c. *Pierre wonders that it is raining

(2)

a. Pierre knows whether it is raining b. *Pierre believes whether it is raining c. Pierre wonders whether it is raining

These contrasts in embedding behavior do not only hold for E nglish but ar e widely suppor ted by cross-linguistic data (Kar ttunen 1977, Ginzburg 1995, Lahiri 2002). The contrast betw een wonder and know, in particular, plays an impor tant role in the theor y of questions put forward by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1982), and serves as the basis of their distinction betw een the intension and the extension of a question (to which we shall return). To some extent, the opposition between know and believe has been less systematically studied, despite a number of obser vations on the contrast, both b y philosophers and b y linguists ( Vendler 1972, Hintikka 1975, Lewis 1982, Zuber 1982, Groenendijk and Stokhof 1982, B erman 1991, G inzburg 1995, Lahiri 2002, and mor e recently, Saebø 2007). In his paper, however, Hintikka observed that the diff erence in question-embedding behavior between know and believe seems to be correlated with the factiv e vs. non-factiv e feature of each of the two v erbs. Thus, Hintikka conjectured that “only verbs which can have a success force may enter into a wh-construction” (Hintikka 1975, 21). For instance, non-factive verbs used to report belief, like pretend or claim, are non-factive and do not appear to embed questions. On the other hand, attitude verbs like see, remember, forget, which also bear a semantic connection to know, are both factive and question-embedding. Despite this, H intikka did not pr ovide a detailed explanation of the link between factivity and question-embedding behavior. The aim of the present paper is to take a closer look at this connection, namely to examine how robust it is and how it may be derived. Let us call Hintikka’s hypothesis the factivity hypothesis, that is the hypothesis according to which the only verbs that take both declarativ e and interr ogative complements ar e the factive verbs. The factivity hypothesis immediately raises two pr oblems: the first concerns the defi nition of the notion of factivity that is r elevant in the formulation of the hypothesis. Among philosophers and logicians, a predicate is generally called factiv e if it is simply veridical, namely if it entails the tr uth of its complement (see e.g. Williamson 2000). Among linguists, a predicate is usually called factiv e if it presupposes the tr uth of its complement (Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1970, Karttunen 1971). Which of these two defi nitions is most relevant is of central importance for testing 86

the empirical adequacy of the generalization, which is the second main problem raised by the hypothesis. Thus, v erbs like tell or decide ar e not v eridical, and y et they admit whether-complements. This suggests that v eridicality is not a necessar y condition in order for a verb that takes that-complements to also embed questions. Conversely, as pointed out by Lahiri (2002), a verb like regret is generally considered factive and veridical, but it does not admit whethercomplements. This suggests that factivity is not even a sufficient condition for verbs that take that-complements to embed questions. In what follows, however, I want to suggest that at least one half of the factivity hypothesis is correct. More precisely, my suggestion is that all veridical attitude verbs are question-embedding. The converse direction, as w e will see, is mor e problematic, and it not obvious that all verbs that admit boththat-complements and whether-complements should be factive. The aim of this paper, however, is to try and defend the hypothesis in its strong form, if only to see where it is most likely to break down. Before we proceed, I want to make the cav eat that this paper is fundamentally on the link between that-complements and whether-complements, rather than on wh-complements in general.To be more precise, what I want to examine is to what extent factivity can be seen as necessar y and sufficient in order for a v erb that takes that-complements to take whether-complements. The restriction to whether-complements has to do with the fact that some verbs that do not licence whether-complements do seem to licence wh-complements. This happens with emotive predicates like surprise, and even with verbs like believe and regret in appropriate contexts:1 (3) Peter will never believe who came to the party (4) Peter was surprised by who came to the party (5) Peter really regrets who came to the party Not all native speakers of English find (4) and (5) completely acceptable, but for some of them these sentences ar e fi ne. On the other hand, for both kinds of speakers the same contexts clearly r ule out the embedding of whether-complements: (6) *Peter will never believe whether Mary came to the party 1. See Lahiri (2002) for a discussion of whether wh-complements should be seen as questions (rather than free relatives, or exclamatives) after such verbs.

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(7) *Peter was surprised by whether Mary came to the party (8) *Peter really regrets whether Mary came to the party In what follo ws, we will r efer to whether-complements as the basic test for question-embedding, setting aside the explanation of why v erbs like surprise are nevertheless able to licence wh-complements.2 The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, I first discuss three different accounts of the impossibility of embeddingwhether-complements after believe, namely the accounts of Zuber (1982), Ginzburg (1995) and Saebø (2007). As we will see, all accounts make direct or indirect use of the notion of factivity to explain why believe, in par ticular, fails to embed questions. None of those, however, explains why factive verbs would embed questions in the fi rst place. I n Section 3, I make a diff erent proposal to deriv e the generalization that all v eridical attitude verbs embed questions. I contrast veridical and factive verbs and explain on what assumptions a veridical verb taking that-complements may be expected to embedwhether-complements. The behavior of pr edicates like regret and it is tr ue that, which challenge the assumption that v eridicality is suffi cient for question-embedding, is discussed in detail. Section 4 examines the conv erse of the generalization, namely the case of non-v eridical verbs that ar e question-embedding (like tell, decide, agree on). In the case of non-veridical verbs like agree and decide, I argue that the presence of an overt or covert preposition (like on, or about) is needed to account for the embedding of whether-complements. The case of tell is diff erent, but it is at least consistent with the pr esent account to assume that it is systematically ambiguous betw een a v eridical and nonveridical reading. To get to the heart of my proposal, the reader may wish to go dir ectly to the positiv e account laid out in S ection 3, and to come back only later to the discussion of alternative accounts given in Section 2. 2. Facts and factivity In this section I compare three different accounts of the distribution ofthatand whether-complements among attitude verbs. I start with the examination 2. See Saebø 2007 for a r ecent discussion of whether-complements after surprise. One of Saebø’s examples is par ticularly intriguing, namely “D on’t read this installment befor e seeing the episode if you want to be surprised at whether or not H ercules makes it” (example (25) in Saebø’s paper). Saebø uses the example to argue that the exclusion of whether-complements after surprise is pragmatic, and not syntactic or semantic.

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of a little kno wn note b y Zuber 1982, and go on to examine G inzburg’s 1995 theor y, and the pragmatic account r ecently put for ward by Saebø 2007. In all of these theories, w e will see that the notion of factivity plays an explanatory role, but only indir ectly. In particular, none of these theories explains why factiv e verbs should embed questions in the fi rst place. 2.1 Neg-raising and factivity (Zuber 1982) In a brief note, Zuber observed that neg-raising verbs cannot take whethercomplements, and pr oposed to explain this failur e on the basis of their neg-raising behavior. Believe, in particular, is neg-raising, which means that a sentence of the form “ x does not believ e that p”, where negation takes wide scope o ver the v erb, can be used to mean the str onger “x believes that not p”, in which the verb raises above negation: (9)

Mary does not believ e that it will rain º Mary believes that it will not rain

A verb like believe clearly differs from know in this respect, since for know that inference is not available: (10) Mary does not know that it will rain i Mary knows that it will not rain The inference associated to neg-raising is not usually consider ed to be a semantic entailment, but rather a semantic or pragmatic infer ence of a different sort (namely a pr esupposition, or an implicatur e).3 Zuber does not say what he takes the status of the infer ence to be, but he basically handles it as a semantic entailment for the purpose of his argument. Zuber’s explanation makes fur ther assumptions about the semantic behavior of whether-complements. In particular, Zuber assumes that for any verb V that takes both that- and whether-complements: (a) “ V that p” implies “V whether p” (Vp º
V ?p) and likewise: 3. See Gajewski 2005, chapter 1, for a review of different views about neg-raising. Gajewski himself handles neg-raising as a semantic infer ence, based on a cancellable pr esupposition of the corresponding verb.

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(b)

“not V that p” implies “not V whether p” (™Vp º ™V ?p)

In par ticular, both infer ences appear to be satisfi ed with a v erb like know: (11) Pierre knows that it is raining º Pierre knows whether it is raining (12) Pierre does not kno w that it is raining º Pierre does not kno w whether it is raining Zuber’s argument pr oceeds b y reductio to sho w that if believe whether was a grammatical construction, this would confl ict with the neg-raising behavior of believe, based on the assumptions made about the behavior of whether-complements. Thus one would have: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

™Bp º
B™p B™p º B?p ™Bp º B?p ™Bp º ™B?p ™Bp º
B?p š™B?p

(neg-raising) (from (a)) (from (1) and (2)) (from (b)) (from (3) and (4))

The conclusion is that if “believe whether p” was grammatical “Pierre does not believe whether p” would be impossible to utter without contradiction. Granting Zuber’s premises, his account would explain why other negraising verbs, like want for instance, do not takewhether-complements. On the other hand, we may note that his theory leaves unexplained why a verb like regret, which is not neg-raising, does not take whether-complements. This is not b y itself an objection, of course, since for such a v erb other mechanisms could v ery well come into play to explain the ex clusion of whether-complements. More problematically, as pointed out by B. Spector (p.c.