the boundaries of language

As Shawn points out, there have been a crop of interesting reviews put up on NDPR recently. Here's my pick.

Of most interest to readers of this blog will probably be Gary Ostertag's excellent review of Jason Stanley's collected papers, Language in Context. Ostertag does a much better job of setting out the motivations for Jason's project than I did in my earlier post on the matter, and the review offers a mini-summary of some of the criticisms that have been made since the papers were first published, along with some insights of its own. Overall, the review ends on a very complimentary note:

'The forgoing indicates certain challenges facing the Indexicalist. But there is no question that Language in Context is an outstanding achievement. Not since Stephen Neale's Descriptions has a book brought the apparatus of formal semantics and linguistic theory to bear on issues in the philosophy of language in such a constructive and illuminating way.'

Stephen Hetherington has a review of Keith Hossack's dense and ambitious The Metaphysics of Knowledge. I wasn't able to work my way through the whole book last semester, but some of Hetherington's criticisms seem right on the money. Hetherington's right, for instance, that Keith seems frustratingly unwilling to consider the range of options available to us in the debates he enters into, and this sometimes led to the feeling that he hasn't really motivated his particular positions in those debates. That made it a little hard to appreciate the detailed and careful developments Keith offers of these positions. And like Hetherington, I also found the knowledge-one approach a little unsatisfying and underdeveloped (though I'm sure Hetherington has overstated the extent to which Keith's approach was inspired by Williamson. That said, the book seemed very well written, very thoughtful, and to contain characteristically interesting and imaginative contributions to a wide range of central philosophical debates. Some of these merits also come out a little in the review. So despite my gripes with what I've read so far, I'm definitely looking forward to coming back to the book and taking some time to finish it off.

Labels: Jason Stanley, Links

Let me continue the theme of working through John and Marc's paper 'Know-how and Concept Possession' while they're too busy at the SEP to notice...

They claim (fn31) that the following case is a counterexample to any account of knowledge how that fails to make understanding necessary (as they sometime put the condition, knowing how to X requires a minimal understanding of X-ing):

'Irina knows a way of doing a salchow, namely, by taking off from the back inside edge of her skate, jumping in the air, spinning, and landing on the back outside edge of her skate. Moreover, she knows that this is a way of doing a salchow (her coach told her). Suppose, however, that Irina is deeply confused about the concepts back outside edge and back inside edge. In particular, suppose that she takes her back outside edge to be her front inside edge and her back inside edge to be her front outside edge. (As per Burge, we take it that this degree of misunderstanding is consistent with attributing to Irina possession of the concepts back outside edge and back inside edge and associated propositional attitudes.) However, as in the case described above, Irina has a severe neurological abnormality that makes her act in ways that differ dramatically from how she actually takes herself to be acting. Whenever she actually attempts to do a salchow (in accordance with her misconception of a correct way of doing one) this abnormality causes her to reliably perform the correct sequence of moves. Despite the fact that what she is doing and what she takes herself to be doing come apart, she fails to notice the mismatch. (48, fn suppressed)

It's supposedly a counterexample since any account that fails to include the understanding condition (including Stanley and Williamson's better known version of intellectualism) will rule this as a case in which Irina knows how.

But I'm sceptical. Here's a skeletal account of knowledge how, inspired by Nozick's tracking account of knowledge that (we may call it the guiding account):

S knows how to X iff:

1. S is able to X (there's a lot of complexity being suppressed here, of course. See the preceding post for discussion)

2. S has a true belief about how to X

3. ~2 []-> ~1

4. 2 []-> 1

If the tracking account gives some content to the idea that if one knows that p, one has the belief that p in virtue of p's being true, then the guiding account gives some (though admittedly not much) content to the idea that one successfully X's (or would successfully X under the right kind of conditions) in virtue of one's having a true belief about how to X.

These 4 conditions obviously raise as many questions and issues as they speak to, but let's not get into that here. The point for now is just that any account that endorses 4 seems to be in a position to deliver the result that Irina does not know how in John and Marc's case. For although in that case Irina is able to perform the jump, and she has a true belief about how to X (as a result of the testimony she's received from her trainer), there is a relevant class of worlds in which she has the belief and yet she isn't able to successfully perform the jumps; the class of worlds in which she lacks the 'severe neurological abnormality' which so fortunately cancels out her misunderstanding.

The guiding account is obviously just a toy account, but the verdict it offers in the case at hand doesn't seem at all ill-motivated. Just as Gettier-man's belief that either Jones owns a Ford or is in Barcelona fails to count as knowledge because it was merely luck that he formed a true belief, Irina fails to know how to perform the jump because her success at performing it is too lucky; there are close worlds in which Gettier man forms the belief by the same method and yet gets things wrong, and their are close worlds in which Irina tries to X, and has a true belief about how to X, but fails to because the factor that cancels out her misunderstanding is absent. On this analysis of why Irina fails to know how in such a case, it's not significant that Irina misunderstands X-ing. The relevant features of the case are just this; there's some factor which prevents her from knowing how and, crucially, it's a matter of luck, in a pertinent sense, that there's a countervailing factor which stops this from interfering with successful performance. Toy account or not, I think the guiding account provides the basis of a challenge to the claim that the case is a counterexample to any account that lacks the understanding condition.

Labels: Epistemology, Jason Stanley, Knowledge How, Tim Williamson

I think Bryan was probably right in his criticisms of my last post on this topic, but let me post some further thoughts on Cappelen and Lepore's tests for context sensitive. In a footnote on page 101, they give us the 'VP-ellipsis test'. But their discussion of this test has always struck me as somewhat bizarre.

Here's the test in short. Context sensitive expressions have fixed interpretations under VP-ellipsis. So if an expression has a fixed interpretation under VP-ellipsis, it's context sensitive, otherwise not.

This seems initially very surprising. One would have thought that context insensitive expressions also had a fixed interpretation under VP-ellipsis. But Cappelen and Lepore write:

'noncontext sensitive expressions do not exhibit this feature, as in

John bought a car, and so did Bill.' (101fn7)

But here the supposedly context invariant expression is the quantifier expression 'a car' - hardly a good choice of an uncontroversially context invariant expression.

(I'm taking it that 'noncontext sensitive' just means context insensitive here. Let me know if that's wrong).

A page over (102fn8) they suggest that Stanley is hoist by his own petard, since he employs the VP-ellipsis test to argue that vague expressions aren't context sensitive, failing to realize that the test tells against his own treatment of quantifier domain restriction. This isn't the first time I've encountered this interpretation of Stanley's argument, so I think it's worth pointing out it's badly mistaken. Stanley never uses the VP-ellipsis test, and in fact, he never argues that vague expressions as a class are context insensitive. Rather, he argues that even if they are context sensitive, that doesn't serve to offer a unified solution to the Sorites paradoxes. He takes contextualists to be making the claim that vague expressions are indexicals, and constructs instances of the Sorites which employ VP-ellipsis to fix the interpretation of the vague expression in question throughout the series. The contextualist about vagueness wanted to disarm the reasoning driving the Sorites whilst explaining why we find it so compelling, and Stanley's objection is that the contextualist's story, in terms of context shifts as we run through the series, has limited scope.

So Stanley doesn't use the VP-ellipsis test to argue that vague expressions are context insensitive. That's a really bad interpretation of his argument. Rather he uses the fact that indexicals have a fixed interpretation under VP-ellipsis (a couple of tricky examples such as the now famous A - 'I love you', B - 'I do too' exchange aside) to enable him to construct instances of the Sorites which contextualist accounts of vague expressions (or at least those according to which they are indexicals) can't disarm. And since the claimed fact is explicitly restricted to indexicals (and demonstratives), we needn't expect quantifier expressions to behave similarly.

So let me boldly state my conclusion: the VP-ellipsis test provides no test for context sensitivity, and it is powerless against Stanley's acccount of quantifier domain restriction. Right?

Labels: Cappelen and Lepore, Context Dependence, Jason Stanley, Philosophy of Language

Why are philosophers, and not just philosophers of language, so interested in the phenomenon of quantifier domain restriction (QDR)?

1. One reason stressed, by Jason in Knowledge and Practical Interests, is that David Lewis based his contextualist semantics for knowledge attributions on QDR. The sceptic is right to suggest that in order to know that p we must be able to rule out all relevant alternatives to p; to adopt fallibilism, according to which one may felicitously utter 'p, but I haven't ruled out possibilities in which not-p', is madness. But the sceptic fails to recognize that this does not set an absolute standard on which alternatives need to be ruled out; it's 'all' of them, but in everyday contexts the domain of 'all' is seriously restricted. In particular, we can properly ignore sceptical scenarios. Indeed, Jason argues against Lewis's epistemic contextualism on the grounds that knowledge attributions don't behave like uncontroversial cases of QDR in the relevant respects (see Jonathan's recent post for discussion of Jason's argument). So a proper understanding of QDR is necessary to evaluate certain proposals in epistemology.

(I don't mean to endorse Lewis's characterization of fallibilism here. As most of you will know, Jason and others have resisted Lewis's argument against fallibilism on the grounds that it was never committed to the felicity of the problem utterances in the first place.)

2. QDR also plays an important role in defending various views Lewis held in metaphysics. For example, how are we to square the apparent truth of,

i. there are no talking donkeys,

with the truth of moral realism, according to which if there could be talking donkeys, then in some worlds there are talking donkeys? Likewise, how are we to square universalism--the doctrine that some things always compose some further thing--with our ordinary talk, which seems to pay no heed to objects like the fusion of my iPod and Jeremy Bentham's preserved corpse? In each case, it can be contended that in ordinary settings, we implicitly restrict our quantifiers, ignoring possibilia and gruesome fusions. (See Dan's paper for a critique of this as a defense of the claim that universalism is continuous with common-sense.)

3. Stephen Neale has argued that the puzzle associated with so-called incomplete definite descriptions, such as:

ii. the table is covered with books,

should not be thought of as providing a decisive objection to Russellian views according to which definite descriptions are really quantificational (and imply uniqueness), since the fact that the existence of a bare table in St Andrews does not entail the falsity of my utterance of:

iii. every table is covered with books

made in a room full of book-laden tables in Austin clearly does not impugn the claim that (iii) has quantificational form. The problem of incomplete definite descriptions is really one and the same as the problem of giving a satisfactory account of QDR.

iv. Stanley and Szabo (70) take QDR as a test case for determining the source and nature of an expression's dependence on context. That is, the process by which they think we arrive at a satisfactory account of QDR provides a model for discussion of other constructions. So one might hope that a proper understanding of QDR will lead to better understanding of context dependence in natural language more generally.

Of course, these do not exhaust the sources of philosophical interest in QDR. But I thought it was worth setting on the table some implications for epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of language before turning our attention to Stanley and Szabo's paper.

Labels: Context Dependence, Jason Stanley, Language in Context

I'm getting a little out of order here, but I had to read Literal Meaning over the break, so it made sense to offer something on Jason's NDPR review just now, and then come back to 'On Quantifier Domain Restriction'.

One of the things I've noticed reading the literature on this stuff is that no one agrees about where the really interesting issues lie. Recanati, for example, spends a great deal of time putting distance between his view and Relevance Theory on issues such as whether primary pragmatic processes (those that go into determining truth-conditional content, rather than those by which what is communicated is determined) are inferential (a topic which some of you will know is becoming very close to my heart). In contrast, Jason writes:

'the genuinely important disputes in the theory of meaning are between those who maintain that the contents primarily asserted by speakers are not generally the semantic contents of the sentences they use (even relative to contexts), and those who maintain that the contents primarily asserted by speakers are generally (not always, but typically) the semantic contents of the sentences used (relative to those contexts).' (237)

Cappelen and Lepore also want to downplay the importance of debates between contextualists, but from their perspective, Jason's view is to be lumped together with Recanati and the Relevance theorists:

'The label 'the Deep/Fundamental Issues' should be awarded to a range of issues independent of any debates internal to MC or RC.'
(Insensitive Semantics: 13)

So not only do we have a range of very different takes on this set of issues, which position one takes seems to shape one's perception of where the real action is. I don't think this is at all unusual in philosophy, but here we have a particularly stark illustration of the phenomenon.

Jason's review is of particular note between it takes on directly the difficult tasks of offering a taxonomy of positions in the debate and trying to get clear on what's at stake between them (as befits a review of Recanati's book). It also raises some methodological issues about how the debate should be conducted, and it's these I want to discuss here. I'll come to them a little indirectly, however, via a discussion of the following (independently interesting) issue.

Let's follow Recanati in calling the thesis Jason wants to defend indexicalism, and consider the following question: does indexicalism start at a serious disadvantage in the nature over the nature and extent of context sensitivity in natural language? In Literal Meaning, Recanati argues that indexicalism does indeed occupy lower ground, on account of the kind of claim the indexicalist must defend:

'Without going into those [technical and empirical] details, it is fair to say that the indexicalist starts with a significant disadvantage; for he makes a universal claim while his opponent only makes an existential claim. For his opponent to win, it is sufficient to produce one convincing example of a strong pragmatic effect. But the indexicalist is condemned to deal with all putative cases, and to show that they are not what they seem to be.' (2004: 89-90)

Jason writes in response:

'Recanati misstates the dialectical situation. The contextualist's method for arguing against indexicalism is to produce a reading R of a sentence S, and argue that R is not the result of the semantic interpretation of S, relative to the context of utterance. In each such case there are three responses available to the indexicalist.......The advocate of strong pragmatic effects on intuitive truth-conditions must produce a case, and show that none of these options is available for that case. For each putative case in which it can be persuasively argued that [it is not an option to 'establish that the alleged reading is not part of the intuitive truth-conditions of an utterance of that sentence, but is instead due to the pragmatics'], the contextualist [...] must establish that there is no way of accounting for the problematic reading within the semantics. From this perspective, it is the contextualist who makes a universal claim.' (239)

It's not immediately clear what Jason is claiming here. The first and last sentences of this passage might suggest that he thinks Recanati has just got things back to front; it is the contextualist who makes the universal claim and the indexicalist who makes the existential claim. But that doesn't seem quite right. For indexicalist clearly does make a universal claim; recall Jason's statement of his core thesis from the opening lines of 'Context and Logical Form':

'My purpose in this chapter is to defend the thesis that all truth-conditional effects of extra-linguistic context can be traced to logical form.' (30)

So I think a charitable reading of Jason's response to Recanati has to credit him with recognition that at some level Recanati has correctly described the structure of the debate between them. I think that in claiming that Recanati 'misstates the dialectical situation', Jason is referring less to the claim about the structure of the debate, and more to the suggestion that the indexicalist starts with a disadvantage. The contextualist might only have to produce one persuasive case of a truth-conditional effect of extra-linguistic context which is not traceable to logical form, but Jason's real objection is that Recanati has misrepresented how easy it will be to come up with the golden ticket here.

Interestingly, Jason's response here seems to assume that indexicalism should be the default position, and that the burden is on the contextualist to provide examples that aim to move us away from indexicalism. This is a point he addresses explicitly in the review, responding to Recanati's charge that indexicalism is 'dogmatic and stipulative' (it's also a theme of the introduction to Language in Context, recall). He writes:

'Why believe the indexicalist hypothesis? Recanati finds excluding "top-down" or "strong" pragmatic effects on intuitive truth-conditions "as dogmatic and stipulative as the literalist restriction of context-sensitivity to a short list of familiar indexical expressions' (160). But the indexicalist claim is an empirical hypothesis, not a stipulation about content. Furthermore, it is an empirical hypothesis that has a reasonable basis.' (238)

'The indexicalist's position is a plausible starting hypothesis for how language is able to be sufficiently elastic as to be usable, and sufficiently rule-governed as to be useful. It is a reasonable empirical hypothesis, in advance of detailed inquiry.' (239)

But I'm not sure this really gets at Recanati's worry. Though he perhaps didn't put things very well by accusing indexicalism of being 'dogmatic and stipulative' (and hence inviting precisely the kind of response Jason offers), I think Recanati worry is methodological from the outset. The charge he wants to make isn't really that Jason's claim is empirically empty; as he admits in a passage cited above, the issues get technical and empirical very quickly. The point is rather that we shouldn't endorse such a general thesis in advance of examining the various constructions. We should instead adopt methodological contextualism:

'Any expression may, upon analysis, turn out to have a context-sensitive semantics, that is, be such that its truth-conditional contribution varies across contexts.'

Put in hippy form, Recanati's objection to Jason is that he's not going into the study of particular constructions with an open mind; he's already laid down in advance a strong generalization about the limited role extra-linguistic context can play, and that, Recanti is suggesting, is stifling.

If this is how we should take Recanati's objection (and I think it is, though I have to admit there are passages in these pages where he clearly seems to be making the kind of charge of empirical emptiness that Jason takes him to be), then Jason's comments in his review don't really seem to get to the heart of the issues; Recanati would presumably just regard it as more of what he was objecting to. That's not to say Jason has nothing to say in response; on the contrary he's going to push the line that contextualist views that allow extra-linguistic context to determine truth-conditional content in ways that go beyond providing values for items in logical form render mysterious how it is that we can interpret the utterances of others as smoothly as we are able to. And so indexicalism provides a better starting point. As he writes in the introduction to the book:

'I have great difficulty seeing alternative proposals as sufficiently constrained. Proposals that appear smoothly to account for the bewildering variety of ways in which context appears to affect the relation between utterances and their intuitive truth-conditions only do so because they appeal (whether overtly or covertly) to interpretative processes that are deeply mysterious or wildly unconstrained. I prefer to explore a view that is neither mysterious nor unconstrained, and see how far one can use it to explain our linguistic behavior. If, at the end of the day, my proposal is too constrained, perhaps the investigation into its adequacy will reveal systematic ways of modifying it or liberalizing it. This seems more promising that beginning with a mysterious and unconstrained process, and trying to add on stipulative constraints. If we do not have a clear grip on the process with which we began, why thing that adding on restrictions will yield any greater elucidation?' (21)

We'll get to assess the charge of lack of constraint when we get to 'Making it Articulated'. In any case, these methodological issues about which perspective we should adopt going into the empirical study of different constructions seem about as challenging, rich and important as the issues about who's right, and it's a virtue of Jason review that it brings the former issues into such sharp focus.

Labels: Cappelen and Lepore, Context Dependence, Jason Stanley, Language in Context, Philosophy of Language, Recanati

I'm thrilled with how much interest and discussion my first post on Jason Stanley's Language in Context has generated already. Thanks to everyone who's joined in the discussion. I'll start here by offering a reasonably substantive summary of what I think Jason's up to. It goes without saying that this is no substitute for reading Jason himself, but it does help me to get to grips with what's going on, and it gives those of us up for discussion a refresher so we're all on more or less the same page. I should add that last time I was in St Andrews I attended a very useful seminar on this paper led by Andreas - sadly I no longer have his handout, but the discussion there improved my understanding of the paper considerably.

Next up is Jason's 2000 Linguistics and Philosophy paper, 'Context and Logical Form'. I first read 'Context and Logical Form' on a flight between Houston and New Jersey. The flight left about 4am, and I hadn't managed to get any sleep the previous night. So this paper has very strong and very strange associations for me.

Last time we saw that Jason wants the process of trying to figure out what was expressed by another's utterance to be a highly constrained process. The way he thinks that a sentence constrains the interpretation of any utterance of it is simply stated as the opening line of the paper:

'My purpose in this chapter is to defend the thesis that all truth-conditional effects of extra-linguistic context can be traced to logical form.' (30)

Jason then tells us how to understand this thesis:

LOGICAL FORM: By "logical form", Jason means to talk about the so-called "real structure" of the sentence - the claim isn't to be read as the relatively uninteresting and uncontroversial thesis that all truth-conditional effects of context can be traced to logical form, conceived of as merely a representation of each natural language construction in a notation which makes any dependence on context perspicuous for the purpose of interpretation (30).

TRUTH-CONDITIONS: For his purposes in this paper, we're to think of truth-conditions as structured propositions: 'an ordered sequence of objects and properties' (31). The choice, at least in this context, is to be regarded as a matter of convenience rather than adherence to a substantial doctrine about the metaphysics of truth-conditions.

I seem to remember that Jason used to bill 'Context and Logical Form' as his 'statement piece' on the semantics-pragmatics interface, though I wonder if he now considers his joint piece with Jeff King (which is a mere 3 papers away on our quest) to supersede it on that front. In any case, Jason spends some time in the present paper orientating himself. He considers just three ways of carving things up, though he acknowledges (33) that they don't even begin to exhaust the options here.

SEMANTICS/PRAGMATICS:

1. Semantics is the study of context-invariant meaning, while pragmatics is the study of the contribution of context to communication.

2. Semantic interpretation involves the evaluation of expressions relative to contexts of utterance. So even at the stage on semantic interpretation, context can play a role in assigning denotations to elements in the logical form of an expression. Pragmatic interpretation involves taking the product of semantic interpretation and evaluating it with respect to (Gricean) conversational maxims.

3. Semantic interpretation is the process of interpretation that leads to truth-conditions. Pragmatics is 'the study of those aspects of interpretation that take as input the truth-conditions of a linguistic act, and yield other propositions implicated by that speech act' (33).

Jason opts for the second way of conceiving of the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics, though he notes (33) that if his central thesis is correct, the second and third ways of drawing the distinction coincide.

We're now in a position to get clearer on Jason's master thesis. The contribution made by extra-linguistic context in the interpretation of an assertion is restricted to the assignment of values to elements in the logical form of the expression uttered (34). (Jason's thesis isn't really restricted to assertions (31), but he focuses on assertions in this paper). Associated with each such element are rules placing very tight constraints on what context is allowed to throw that element's way; hence the role of extra-linguistic context on determining the truth-conditions of an assertion is very limited. As Jason points out (35):

'If this picture of truth-conditional interpretation is correct, then it is fundamentally different from other kinds of interpretation, like the kind involved in interpreting kicks under the table and taps on the shoulder.'

This aspect of Jason's view has always really intrigued me. And it really gets to the heart of Jason's disagreement with those such as the relevance theorists, discussed in a passage in the introduction that I didn't talk about last time:

'One possible way to pursue a systematic strategy for explaining the relation between utterances and the truth-conditions they intuitively possess is to attempt a systematic explanation of rational communicative action generally. On this model, advocated for example by relevance theorists such as Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson and Robyn Carston, there is a systematic account of interpretation of the mental states of others. It is our ability to make reasonable inference from the observable behavior and characteristics of our interlocutors to their mental states that ultimately explains our success in acquiring information from their utterances. On this model, linguistic behavior is no different in kind from the other cues (winks and nods, half-smiles) our interlocutors give about their inner narratives.' (9, my emphasis, some references suppressed)

For Jason, this just doesn't do justice to the speed and ease with which we arrive at the specific truth-conditions of another's assertion from hearing them having made the utterance they made (10). Unlike interpreting winks, nods and kicks under the table, interpreting the utterances of another has to be a process that is subject to considerable constraints imposed by the very expressions they uttered - as Jason nicely puts it, it has to be 'under linguistic control' (10).

Jason's opponents hear aren't just the relevance theorists; he mentions also Kent Bach, Rob Stainton, Charles Travis, and Francois Recanati. What unites such theorists is their conviction that semantics doesn't deliver up anything truth-conditional; semantics is only able to offer up something contextually impoverished, since on such views 'the truth-conditions of most utterances go well beyond what semantics can legitimately assign to the logical forms of the sentences uttered' (35). We would do better to think, with Recanati, of truth-condition pragmatics rather than truth-conditional semantics.

Pushing theorists in this direction, Jason thinks, are two assumptions:

FIRST ASSUMPTION: 'In semantic interpretation, one may never postulate hidden structure that is inconsistent with correct syntactic theory.' (35)

SECOND ASSUMPTION: 'In deriving the semantic interpretation of a logical form, every feature of the semantic interpretation must be the semantic value of something in that logical form, or introduced via a context-independent construction rule.' (36)

Jason agrees with both assumptions - he just thinks that his opponents have an impoverished conception of what the elements in the logical form of a various context sensitive expressions will be. That's an empirical issue, to be settled on a construction by construction basis, and so we turn from the grand design to particular constructions; Jason here considers two, which have been thought to undermine the kind of picture of semantic interpretation he favors, namely alleged cases of non-sentential assertion and 'utterances of expressions with sentential structure, which appear to express full-blown propositions, propositions that contain constituents which do not appear to be the values of any constituent in the logical form of the expression uttered' (39).

In the comments of the previous post, Andreas suggests that it's one of the strengths of Jason's work that he's so willing to go beyond programmatic statements of his project, and get stuck into problem cases. I think that's right, but for now I want to maintain a pretty high altitude, and discuss the importance of Jason's project for a particular topic that I'm very very interested in - the inferentialism/anti-inferentialism debate in discussions of linguistic understanding.

Consider again the third distinction between semantics and pragmatics; this splits the process of interpreting another's utterances into two parts, which following some of the plethora of terminological options here we'll describe as arriving at what was said, then determining what was meant. Arriving at what was said is a matter of semantic and perhaps pragmatic interpretation, yielding something propositional, while determining what was meant involves taking the result of semantic interpretation and evaluating it with respect to the maxims governing conversation to determine what implicatures and the like are generated. Even if we want to hold that this isn't the right way to cash out the semantics-pragmatics distinction, let us just agree to regard the latter process as a matter of inference. What of the first process, arriving - by a process of semantic interpretation or a blend of semantic and pragmatic interpretation -at something propositional and truth-conditional? Is this, at least in central cases, inferential or not?

One might have thought this issue turned on the quantity and nature of the context-sensitivity one is willing to acknowledge in natural language. As Jason writes elsewhere, arguing against accounts of linguistic understanding according to which understanding is a non-inferential perceptual or 'quasi-perceptual' grasping (see Fricker 2003, Pettit 2002, 2005):

'...the pervasive context-sensitivity and ambiguity of natural language sentences forces hearers to engage in inferential reasoning about meaning in order to grasp what is said by an utterance.' (2005: 131)

'Virtually every sentence we hear contains context-dependent expressions. Therefore, virtually all of our experience as language interpreters involves making consciously accessible linguistically guided inferences about semantic content.' (2005: 132)

So here's a thought. If you want to defend anti-inferentialism, you should deny the ubiquity of context-sensitivity in natural language. If the list of context-sensitive expressions is more or less exhausted by Cappelen and Lepore's basic set, for example, that might suggest that arriving at what is said, still considered as something truth-conditional for our present purposes, need not be considered an inferential achievement. To motivate moderate or radical contextualism over semantic minimalism, then, would be to motivate inferentialism.

But arguably, things aren't so simple. In fact, it's not only arguable, it's been argued. In his 'Does Linguistic Communication Rest on Inference?', Recanati acknowledges that in general the phenomenon of what he calls 'semantic underdetermination' provides the ammunition for 'the most powerful weapon in the inferentialist's hands' (2002: 2002). Nonetheless, despite holding that reaching something truth-conditional requires a generous helping hand from pragmatic interpretation, he thinks that one we properly understand the anti-inferentialist position, it is the more plausible position to adopt. The good news for perceptual or quasi-perceptual accounts of understanding is that 'communication is 'as direct as' perception' (2002: 125). I'm obviously glossing over a ton of details here, but the upshot if Recanati is right will be that the inferentialism/anti-inferentialism debate turns out to be much richer and more complex than we'd envisaged above. And even demonstrating a ubiquity of context-sensitive expressions outside the basic set in natural language sentences won't bury the Fricker-Pettit account of linguistic understanding, or related anti-inferentialist positions concerning linguistic communication.

I should pause to note that Jason is very careful to state his target in the 2005 paper I've been referring to, and it's plausible to think that he hits it even if one accepts Recanati's point. Jason's official target is the claim that it's a phenomenological datum that, at least in central cases, speakers simply non-inferentially grasp what is said by the utterances of others. It is, of course, perfectly consistent with recognizing the complexity of the inferentialism/anti-inferentialism debate that one urge that the ubiquity of context-sensitivity and ambiguity in natural language shows that the phenomenological claim can't be regarded as a datum.

This points at another way in which the project Jason undertakes in 'Context and Logical Form' and its successors engages with this issue. One might hold that underlying the claim that the phenomenology of linguistic understanding shows that (in central cases) hearers non-inferentially grasp what is said by the utterances of others is a true datum. It's something Jason stressed in the introduction: in most cases, we smoothly, almost effortlessly and almost instantly arrive at what was said by another's utterance, even when dealing with novel sentences. As we saw in the last post, this provides the central motivation for Jason's thesis that the process of interpretation which delivers the truth-conditions of utterances must be highly constrained. So one can see Jason as attempting to do justice to what we might hold to be the real datum underlying the controversial claim that linguistic understanding is nothing more than a kind of non-inferential grasping, thereby knocking out much of the motivation for that claim.

References:

Fricker, E. 2003. Understanding and Knowledge of What is Said. In Barber., ed. Epistemology of Language. OUP.
Pettit, D. 2002. Why Knowledge is Unnecessary for Understanding Language. Mind 111: 519-50.
- 2005. Belief and Understanding: A Rejoinder to Gross. Mind 114: 67-74.
Recanati, F. 2002. Does Linguistic Communication Rest on Inference? Mind & Language 17: 105-26.
Stanley, J. 2000. Context and Logical Form. Linguistics and Philosophy 23: 391-434.
- 2005. Hornsby on the Phenomenology of Speech. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 79: 131-46.

Labels: Context Dependence, Jason Stanley, Language in Context, Philosophy of Language

I've been reading the introduction to Jason Stanley's Language in Context, which I got my hands on this week, and it gives a nicer summary of the considerations motivating his project than I think we've had previously. I'm going to be reading the essays over the next while, and I thought I'd try to blog along the way. Here I'm going to be unambitious, and simply try to get straight on the motivations for the project Jason tries to carry out over the course of the papers.

The main thesis seems to be that semantics serves up the intuitive truth-conditions of utterances in a systematic way, even given the ubiquity of context-sensitivity in natural language. There seem to be two main kinds of considerations pushing Jason towards this view:

a. Only then can we avail ourselves as semanticists of the resources afforded by speakers' judgments concerning the intuitive truth-conditions of various utterances
b. Only then can we account for our ability to effortlessly acquire information about the world from hearing utterances of novel sentences (even when those sentences are context-sensitive)

In this introduction, Jason seems to focus on three principle kinds of opponent to his project. Firstly, there are those who think that successful communication doesn't require that one grasp the same proposition as was expressed by another's utterance, but only one sufficiently similar (Jason attributes this thesis to Heck and Bezuidenhout). From his perspective, Jason just thinks this rests on an unsupported pessimism - part of his project is precisely to explain why grasping the proposition another's utterance expressed isn't nearly as demanding as people have supposed.

The second kind of opponent, represented by the authors of Insensitive Semantics, agrees with Jason that semantics should offer up something truth-conditional, but thinks that asking for the intuitive truth-conditions is demanding too much. Instead the semanticist can only offer the minimal proposition - an 'informationally impoverished monstrosity' as Jason describes it (12) - and has to leave all of the real work - explaining how we so effortlessly gain information about the world from each other's utterancs, which presumably involves entertaining something other than the minimal proposition - to pragmatics. And, as Cappelen and Lepore very explicitly stress, if my memory serves me correctly, this view cannot avail itself of the resources afforded by speaker-judgments about the intuitive truth-conditions of utterances. As far as Jason is concerned, that's like trying to do syntax whilst ignoring native speakers' judgments of grammaticality and ungrammaticality; it's tying both your arms behind your back before the big fight.

Lastly, we have those who think that semantics can only serve up things which fall short of determining truth-conditions - again, the real work is done at the level of pragmatics. Jason thinks that this just renders the whole process of interpreting an utterance of a sentence in a language one understands altogether too unconstrained and mysterious. We might be pushed to such a view should it prove that no project like Jason's can be successful, but it's not a fruitful starting point for understanding communication.

Does this seem like a reasonable summary of the kinds of pressures Jason takes himself to be responding to?

Labels: Context Dependence, Jason Stanley, Language in Context, Philosophy of Language, Relevance Theory

I've been following with interest the thread on Leiter Reports discussing Jason's post on the relevancy of facts about natural language to philosophy.

Now Marc Moffett has a post up on Close Range critiquing Weinberg, Nichols, and Stitch's research indicating cross-cultural variation in responses to Gettier cases. It seems like this is to be the first in a series of posts on this topic. Anyone with a serious interest in philosophical methodology should head over there.

Labels: Jason Stanley, Links, Methodology

Congratulations to Jason Stanley, whose Knowledge and Practical Interests, which I'm currently re-reading, won the APA book prize. Jason's book, as readers of this blog will know, has formed the basis for many a post here when it first came out, and it's good to see it getting such great recognition. Hopefully I'll find some new things to write about this time around.

Hat-tips: Kvanvig and Leiter.

Labels: Jason Stanley

I think the force of one of Dean Pettit's arguments in 'Why Knowledge is Unnecessary for Understanding Language' has been somewhat missed by a lot of people (on the most common interpretation I've encountered, this includes Pettit himself). The point turns out to have significance for the recent debate about knowing-how sparked by Stanley and Williamson's very influential and important JPhil piece.

Pettit's target is epistemic accounts of linguistic understanding, whereby understanding an expression just is, or at least requires, knowledge of some proposition stating that expression's meaning. Pettit's first attack on the epistemic view proceeds by offering a case in which a subject's belief in the proposition that 'Krankenschwester' means 'Nurse' is Gettierized, and yet we are strongly drawn to judge that the subject nonetheless understands 'Krankenschwester'. The natural reading of Pettit takes his argument to proceed as follows. The moral to draw from the case described is that understanding language, in stark contrast to propositional knowledge as it is usually understood by epistemologists, is unGettierizable. Hence the identification of linguistic understanding with propositional knowledge is untenable, and Gettier cases like the one Pettit offers will be examples of understanding without the relevant piece of propositional knowledge.

But it seems clear that Pettit does not need to make the really strong claim that understanding is unGettierizable. All he needs, and all his case strictly speaking shows, is that there are Gettier cases in which we are prone to judge that a subject understands some expression, and yet that subject's belief in the proposition knowledge of which - according to the epistemic view - constitutes or necessarily accompanies understanding of that expression is Gettierized. That's enough to defeat the epistemic view.

(I should stress, I don't buy Pettit's conclusion. I've been convinced by Stanley in his reply to Hornsby that there's a lot still to be said in favor of the epistemic view. Here I'm simply pointing out that the argument need not rely on drawing the moral that understanding is immune to Gettierization.)

Pettit and others have suggested that his argument against the epistemic view can also be wielded against Stanley and Williamson's proposal that it is true that one knows how to x (in a given context) if and only if for some contextually relevant way w, one stands in the knowledge-that relation to the (Russellian) proposition that w is a way for one to x (and one entertains this proposition under a practical mode of presentation). The basic suggestion is that while propositional knowledge is usually taken to be vulnerable in Gettier cases, knowledge-how - like linguistic understanding - is unGettierizable.

Stanley and Williamson offer two replies to this (435). Firstly, they doubt that propositional knowledge in general is Gettier-susceptible. Secondly, they describe what they take to be a Gettier case for knowledge-how, undermining the claim that knowledge-how is unGettierizable.

But, as with the epistemic view of understanding, it would suffice to object to their proposal if it could be shown that there are Gettier cases in which Stanley and Williamson's biconditional fails: so cases in which we would on reflection attribute the subject knowledge-how to x, and yet we'd hold that the subject fails to stand in the knowledge-that relation to the proposition that w (for some appropriate w) is a way for her to x because her belief has been Gettierized. On a first pass, Stanley and Williamson's responses don't seem to address this point; once we refrain from making the strong claim that knowledge-how is unGettierizable, their purported Gettier case for know-how is besides the point, and unless we have good reason to think that beliefs in propositions of the form 'w is a way for me to x' are amongst the ones that it might be plausible to regard as Gettier-immune, it's hard to see how it helps to point out that some knowledge-that might enjoy such immunity.

The upshot is it seems that there's still room to explore a version of the Pettit objection against the Stanley-Williamson proposal. Mark Sainsbury has suggested to me that if one accepts their account, it will be quite plausible that there could not be Gettier cases in which their biconditional fails (so their first reply, that not all knowledge-that is Gettier-susceptible, is very much to the point after all). As I've blogged before, Stanley and Williamson see themselves in part as trying to challenge the Rylean account of the nature of the knowledge-that relation, and Mark's suggestion is that once we take that challenge seriously, it's very difficult indeed to come up with Gettier cases in which it's intuitively the case that the subject knows how to x, and yet fails to possess the knowledge-that which the right-hand side of the Stanley-Williamson biconditional would have us attribute. So the suggestion is that once we understand the kind of view of the nature of knowledge-that which Stanley and Williamson favor, their proposal is not vulnerable to a Pettit-style objection, even as I've reconstrued it here. I think Mark's probably right about this, and there's no counterexample to Stanley and Williamson in the offing here, but it seems worth thinking more about, and I don't know of any discussion in the literature.

Labels: Epistemology, Jason Stanley, Knowledge How, Philosophy of Language, Tim Williamson

I just discovered that the long-awaited 'Knowledge and Action' by Hawthorne and Stanley is online, so I've spent the morning so far reading it instead of doing anything I was meant to be doing. There's plenty of interest in the paper, including discussion of Fantl and McGrath's earlier proposal, and the development and defense of their own new positive proposal. That said, I found it a little dissatisfactory in a number of ways. First of all, one objection Hawthorne and Stanley have to the Fantl and McGrath proposal is that it looks like it'll have serious trouble retaining multi-premise epistemic closure. In the paper, there's a suggestion that the correct diagnosis of these difficulties is that Fantl and McGrath allow that knowledge might be compatible with probability less than 1. Then when developing their own framework in which to chart the connections between knowledge and reasons for acting, they write (10):

'It is clear enough that if we want multi-premise closure, we had better operate with a notion of probability according to which knowledge delivers probability 1.'

But I take it it's left open whether Hawthorne and Stanley really do retain MPC. Adopting a view on which knowledge delivers probability 1 may allow them to avoid the specific problems that the Fantl and McGrath proposal faced, but Hawthorne's own Knowledge and Lotteries pointed out that adopting knowledge-action principles, given the kind of sensitive-invariantist epistemology both Hawthorne and Stanley have expressed a preference for, may lead to trouble preserving MPC. (I argued last year that Hawthorne's proposal, while it may preserve the letter of single premise closure, seems unable to retain it's spirit). Now, perhaps their new proposal linking knowledge to reasons for action might allow them to steer clear of those problems. But it would have been nice to see the details; in their absence, it seemed entirely unclear whether the new proposal really marked that much of an improvement over Fantl and McGrath with respect to MPC, irregardless of whether knowledge delivers probability 1. As Hawthorne himself put it in his earlier discussion, ensuring that knowledge delivers probability 1 is just a 'first step' (182) towards a vindication of MPC.

But the main gripe I had, as with Hawthorne and Stanley's recent books, is the uncritical Williamsonianism which runs through the paper. That Williamson's anti-luminosity argument establishes its conclusion just seems to be taken for granted. Now, of course one doesn't want to have to reinvent the wheel every time one writes a paper. But on the other hand, it seems strange to treat Williamson's arguments almost like mathematical lemmas that one can simply help oneself to when needed, given their deeply controversial status. More importantly, I would really have liked to have seen a defense of the Williamson/DeRose proposal for handling putative counterexamples to the knowledge account of assertion. Virtually every time something that looks like a counterexample is produced, the reply is that it is a violation of the norm, but that's ok so long as we can find some excuse for the violator (he thought he was conforming to the norm, for example). Hawthorne and Stanley just seem to again take for granted that this kind of response is fine, but it's hard not to feel somewhat uneasy about it. Jennifer Lackey has given voice to these kinds of concerns in section 4 of her 'Norms of Assertion'.

Lastly, it seems relatively straightforward to convert Matt Weiner's counterexamples to the knowledge account of assertion in his excellent Phil Review paper into putative counterexamples to Hawthorne and Stanley's knowledge-action principle. (See p8 of this draft of 'Must We Know What We Say' for the counterexamples). Such cases are specifically designed to be cases in which the asserter doesn't even think their assertion conforms to the knowledge account, and yet we're meant to be pulled to judge that it was perfectly proper. Of course, there may be all kinds of ways to dodge the bullet here. But we're not given any clues about how to do that in the paper.

So, to sum up, the positive proposal of the paper seems really worth exploring, and the comparison with Fantl and McGrath's earlier attempt to articulate the relationship between knowledge and action is very welcome. I think Hawthorne and Stanley are right that this is an issue which has been unfairly neglected. But again I get the sense that chunks of Knowledge and its Limits are taken to be simply not up for discussion. That's very unfortunate. I'm sure our understanding of these aspects of Williamson's epistemology could well benefit from serious attention from Hawthorne and Stanley, but once again they don't receive it.

Labels: Epistemology, Jason Stanley, John Hawthorne, Tim Williamson

In a footnote in her 'How to understand contextualism about vagueness: reply to Stanley', Diana Raffman writes:

'[Stanley] cites Scott Soames (2002: 445) as claiming that vague predicates are indexicals. I am sceptical of this reading of Soames, but I won't press the point here.' (Raffman 2005: 244fn)

I'd really like to have seen her press the point, since as it stands, I'm hugely confused. The first line of the passage from p445 of Soames 2002 (which is his PPR precis of Understanding Truth), quoted by Jason (in his 2003 Analysis piece which Raffman is replying to) is:

'To say that vague predicates are context-sensitive is to say that they are indexical.' (Quoted at Stanley 2003: 270)

And the final line is:

'If, as I believe, vague predicates are context-sensitive, then this is the model on which they must be understood.' (Quoted at Stanley 2003: 271)

Sandwiched in between is what appears to be an elaboration of the claim that vague expressions are indexicals. I'm intrigued to know what might support scepticism about Jason's reading of Soames here.

Labels: Jason Stanley, Vagueness

Over at Leiter Reports, Jason suggests that a more scientific approach towards determining the influence of papers, involving reference to Google Scholar citation results, will give us a better picture.

He's opened a comments thread over there, so you can chip in your tuppence.

Update: Brian W has invited people to offer their Google Scholar findings here.

Labels: Jason Stanley, Links, The Academy

I've had a staggeringly unproductive day today, so let me try to redress that a little by writing up some thoughts about the Eastern APA in DC a couple of weeks ago.

I had a very positive experience overall. I got to see some really interesting talks, and met some interesting people. Let me start with the talks. I've blogged about Adam Elga's talk on disagreement already. I particularly enjoyed hearing Jason Stanley's response to a talk by Charles Wallis. Wallis was attacking the intellectualist line on know-how defended by Jason and Tim Williamson in their 'Knowing How'. In his response, Jason stressed that one of the main aims of their paper had been to dispute Ryle's account of propositional knowledge, so that the claim wasn't that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that as Ryle conceived of the latter, but rather that once we were conceiving of propositional knowledge in the right way, knowledge-how is naturally regarded as a species of knowledge-that. Jason suggested that likewise his disagreement with Wallis was best seen as predominantly over the nature of propositional knowledge. I thought this was an intriguing perspective on the debate, and I have to admit it's one I hadn't really picked up on reading S&W's paper, so I was glad Jason laid that aspect of their project out so nicely in his response.

I also saw Jason and Herman Cappenlen give talks on the so-called problem of shared content that's coming up in recent debates about context-sensitivity. Cappenlen was keen to stress that there are really a cluster of problems here, and he focused on one aspect; speakers' willingness to disquote when reporting others' speech despite a shift in context. Cappenlen utters "I am hungry". I obviously don't accurately report what he said if I tell you that he said I am hungry. Conversely, if these kinds of disquotational indirect reports aren't blocked even when there's been a shift in context, we're meant to get strong evidence that the relevant terms aren't context-sensitive. Cappenlen now acknowledges that this doesn't straightforwardly test for context-sensitivity in the manner just suggested, and so doesn't as neatly as was previously thought provide material for an anti-contextualist argument, so he explored some options for tweaking the test. His talk was about the 60th reminder of 2006 that I really need to read Insensitive Semantics. Jason argued that the problems of shared content weren't really as big as the anti-contextualists make out, and that it wasn't clear semantic minimalism, in positing a minimal proposition expressed by an utterance, was better equipped to handle those problems. All in all, a very enjoyable session.

Philosophy aside, I got to catch up with a number of people from St Andrews, USC, CUNY and elsewhere that I hadn't seen for a while (in particular my friend Roy Cook). I also got to meet some people I'd really hoped to meet while I was there, usually by randomly pouncing on them as they walked by (it's not my usual method of meeting people, I assure you, but it seemed the only one likely to be effective under the circumstances). So I finally met Brit Brogaard and Joe Salerno in person; most readers of this blog will know that I've been interacting relatively regularly with them both since they started blogging last year. I also briefly introduced myself to Karen Bennett, one of our two keynotes at the UT grad conference taking place this coming April. And lastly, I introduced myself at last to Gillian Russell. I have to take the opportunity to apologise to Gillian, who I pounced on at a particularly bad time (right before she was about to give her response to Williamson's 'Conceptual Truth' paper). Gillian was at St Andrews as an undergrad years before I was, and then she went on to pursue graduate studies in the States. So when myself and others came to make a similar move, we heard a lot of good things about Gillian from our professors at St Andrews; she really set the bar high for those of us who followed somewhat in her footsteps. Given this connection, I thought it would be nice to finally get to meet her while we were both in the same place. So my introduction was poorly timed, but well-intentioned.

I was very glad I got a taste of the Eastern before I hit the job-market. That side of things was a little daunting to say the least. It's convinced me that I need to start working a whole lot harder than I have been; there's a lot of things I should know by the time I hit the market which I currently don't, and it's time I started seriously addressing that. It seems like a very hard environment to get taken seriously in. But this seems like a good point at which to learn this.

Labels: Conferences, Jason Stanley, Links, Misc, Philosophy of Language

I've been able to go check my copy of Dummett's Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics to see what he actually wrote, rather than just relying on my all too fallible memory. In light of this, I need to reconsider somewhat Dummett's intentions. But once the remark is set in its proper context, I submit Dummett is clearly not making the "Wittgenstein Fallacy". Here's the quote in full, since it's worth taking in its entirety:

'For those who think in terms of completion rates, mine is disgraceful. 'Completion rates' - the very phrase is like a bell. British universities are in the course of being transformed by idealogues who misunderstand everything about academic work. The transformation is of course merely part of a transformation of society as a whole. The official stance of the idealogues is that they do not believe that there is any such thing as society; in point of fact, however, they do not believe in anything else. They are concerned, for example, with the performance of 'the economy': not with whether individual people are propering, but with the economy as a distinguishable system of its own. The successful performance of the economy will grossly enrich some, and deprice others of all hope or comfort: but the aim, if one is not to take a cynical view of it, cannot be either to reward those who scramble to the top of the economic mountain or to punish those who are cast on to the scrapheap. The vision which the idealogues have of the successful functioning of the economy or of any other social mechanism is that it works well only if operated by human beings engaged in ruthless biting and clawing their way to the top, where they will be able to obtain a disproportionate share of limited rewards. For this purpose, the people so competing with one another should not be encouraged to believe in the good of anything but themselves as individuals; if they were to believe in society as a whole, they might form ideas about protecting the weak or unfortunate that would clog the efficiency of the system. A glance at the universities as they used to be revealed a social sector not functioning in this manner; it therefore obviously could not be functioning efficiently, or justifying the money spent on it, and hence must be transformed in accordance with the model decreed by ideology.

The plan of the idealogues is to increase academic productivity by creating conditions of intense competition. Those who compose what is known, in today's unlovely jargon, as academic and academic-related staff are now to be lured by the hope of gaining, and goaded by the shame of missing, extra payments and newly invented titular status. Their output is monitored by the use of performance indicators, measuring the number of words published per year. Wittgenstein, who died in 1951 having published only one short article after the Tractatus of 1922, would plainly not have survived such a system. Those most savagely affected by the new regime are, as always, the ones on the bottom rung of the ladder: the graduate students working for their doctorates. The degree of Ph.D (in Oxford, D.Phil.) fitted rather awkwardly into the system of doctorates as it had evolved in Britain out of the medieval one, and was originally instituted here to satisfy the needs of foreign students, for whom it was a necessary professional qualification. Only in recent years has it become an indispensable minimum qualification for British academic posts in arts subjects: candidates for them stand little chance if they cannot also show, at the start of their careers, an impressive list of publications. Relentless pressure is applied to students and their universities by the Government and its agencies - the research councils and the British Academy - to force them to complete their doctoral theses within three years of graduating; but it is hardly needed. Nervously conscious from the start that they must jostle one another for the diminished number of posts, they are anxious to jump the first hurdle of the Ph.D degree as quickly as possible, and then rush to submit their unrevised theses for publishers to turn into books.

The universities have no option but to co-operate in organising the squalid scramble that graduate study has become, in introducing the new 'incentives' for their professors and lecturers and in supplying the data for the evaluation process. The question is to what extent they will absorb the values of their overlords and jettison those they used to have. Once more, it is the graduate students who are the most at risk, for they are in effect being taught that the rat-race operates as ferociously in the academic as in the commercial world, and that what matters is not the quality of what you write but the speed at which you write it and get it into print. It is obviously as objectionable in a capitalist as in a communist country that politicians should decide how the universities are to be run; but it is catastrophic when those politicians display total ignorance of the need to judge academic productivity on principles quite different from those applicable to industry. Our masters show some small awareness that, as in industry, quality is relevant as well as quantity: their performance indicators are sometimes modified by the use of more sophisticated criteria, such as counting the number of references made by other writers to a given article. Frege would never have survived such a test: his writings were very seldom referred to in his lifetime. It is not, however, that quantity is not the only criterion, but that it is positively harmful. The reason is that overproduction defeats the very purpose of academic publication. It long ago became impossible to keep pace with the spate of books and of professional journals, whose number increases every year; once this happens, their production becomes an irrelevance to the working academic, save for the occasional book or article he happens to stumble on. This applies particularly to philosophy. Historians may be able to ignore much of their colleagues' work as irrelevant to their periods; but philosophers are seldom so specialised that there is anything they can afford to disregard in virtue of its subject-matter. Given their need for time to teach, to study the classics of philosophy and to think, they cannot afford to plough through the plethora of not bad, not good books and articles in the hope of hitting the one that will truly cast light upon the problems with which they are grappling; hence, if they are sensible, they ignore them altogether.'
(Dummett, M. 1991. Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics. Duckworth: pp. viii-x)

Several things are clear from these paragraphs. Firstly, Dummett didn't commit the "Wittgenstein fallacy"; the claim is restricted to how Wittgenstein might have fared under a system which takes number of words as its performance indicator, rather than being a general claim about how he would fare in something like the present climate. (Something similar should be said about the later remark about Frege.) Secondly, Dummett's concerns are probably more narrow than myself and others have tended to present them; he's talking about a specific place and time, and a particular system. That said, I think the passages still raise more general worries one might have: about the pressure on graduate students and others at the beginning of their careers to publish (even if that's nowhere near as bad as Dummett perceived it to be in Britain during the 80's); about the quantity of material being published and its effects on the profession, and so on. I'm sure most of us, Jason no doubt included, will want to take a much more positive perspective on these issues than Dummett did, but I think there are at least questions being raised here which are recognizably worth discussing.

Labels: Dummett, Jason Stanley, Links, Misc, The Academy, Wittgenstein

I can't resist saying something in response to Jason's suggestion that Dummett commits what he calls the "Wittgenstein Fallacy". I cited Dummett's famous remark from the preface to Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics where he suggests that Wittgenstein wouldn't have fared too well in the current philosophical climate given the demands placed on philosophers to publish.

Jason suggests that Wittgenstein would do just fine, and so it's a fallacy to criticize the existing climate on the grounds that he wouldn't gain recognition or employment. Jason writes:

'Is the claim really that a modern day Wittgenstein wouldn't have tenure somewhere really quite respectable?'

I want to suggest that's not really the claim. I took it Dummett intends the point, as I did in citing it, as purely a piece of rhetoric. I seem to remember that Moore was asked to write a recommendation for Wittgenstein when he had been proposed as Moore's successor to the chair at Cambridge which Simon Blackburn now holds. As I recall, Moore wrote that to deny a professorship of philosophy to Wittgenstein would be like denying a chair in physics to Einstein. The suggestion can't seriously be that Wittgenstein wouldn't be able to make a career in contemporary academic philosophy, even having published just the Tractatus and 'Some Remarks on Logical Form'; surely Jason's right that the profession is not so enamored with publishing that it would fail to recognize such talent, or fail to be impressed by such a recommendation. But I find it hard to believe that Dummett is best read as making a serious suggestion otherwise.

Now, that leaves quite open the issue which I'm suggesting the "Wittgenstein Fallacy" is meant to dramatize; whether there's undue pressure stemming from universities for their academics to aim for quantity rather than quality when publishing. It's my own impression that such pressure does sometimes exist, though naturally I'll have to defer to those who have a better perspective on such matters. Jason has used his platform at Leiter Reports largely to promote a much more upbeat view of contemporary academic philosophy than one often finds elsewhere, both from people outside the profession and sometimes from those within it. I'm sympathetic to most of the points Jason has raised in his series of posts on these and related matters, but I do think there's a issue here that's at least worth discussing, and while the "Wittgenstein fallacy" may be a distracting rhetorical flourish, it does serve to highlight that issue.

Update: I've written a followup to this post, quoting and discussing Dummett's actual words, here. Jason has opened comments on his original post over at Leiter Reports.

Labels: Dummett, Jason Stanley, Links, Misc, The Academy, Wittgenstein

Back in April, I posted an objection to Stanley's version of interest relative invariantism based on the thought that the picture of knowledge offered did violence to intuitive thoughts regarding what expertise consists in. I've just noticed that Duncan Pritchard has a really nice review of Stanley's book up on NDPR, which raises pretty much the same issue (as well as some new objections to the whole project). You can find it here.

Labels: Epistemology, Jason Stanley, Links

When Jason Stanley was here for the UT Grad Conference in April, I took the chance to talk to him about his draft 'Philosophy of Language in the Twentieth Century'. Now, I haven't managed to finish the paper, but it's an impressive survey of a stupidly large field, and Stanley manages to include nice accounts of the contributions made by Tarski and Carnap and other figures who we all acknowledge as a vital part of the story of our subject, but who often get somewhat glossed over in these kinds of overview pieces.

However, one figure who is really noticeably absent is the later Wittgenstein. Moreover, Stanley's assessment of the contribution of the Tractatus to 20th Century philosophy is surprisingly negative:

'The Tractatus impeded progress in philosophy, because it led philosophers (in particular the Logical Positivists) to expend their energies in the pursuit of developing and honing a criterion of meaningfulness, and using the criterion to argue that traditional philosophical theses failed to satisfy it, and were hence meaningless [...]. ' (p10)

Now, Stanley doesn't deny that the Tractatus did some good; in particular, he notes that the connections the early Wittgenstein saw between modality and meaning turned out to yield insights when studied more systematically by later philosophers (p10). But my own assessment of the Tractatus is overall much more upbeat, and I wanted to say a little bit about why.

Firstly, and most germane to Stanley's topic, the Tractatus contains one of the earliest and clearest statements of the thought that the meaning of a sentence is its truth-conditions:

4.024 'To understand a proposition means to know what is the case, if it is true.

(One can therefore understand it without knowing whether it is true or not.)

One understands it if one understands its constituent parts.'

Stanley takes the idea that the proper form a theory of meaning should be truth-conditional to have been 'extraordinarily fruitful, perhaps the most fruitful insight in the long history of the study of meaning' (p18). As David Wiggins presents the history of that insight (in 'Meaning and Truth Conditions: From Frege's Grand Design to Davidson's' in the Hale and Wright Blackwell Companion), the Tractatus marks the first important development of the idea after Frege. From this perspective, the Tractatus should be a integral part of Stanley's story.

I also have a more positive view of the saying/showing distinction. It would be hard not to agree that it provided inspiration for some philosophical wild-goose chases (though I'm not sure how to assess the claim that such failed projects were a symptom of philosophical progress being impeded). On the other hand, I think the distinction led to some geniune insights in maths and logic. Wittgenstein originally introduced the distinction to offer a response to Lewis Carroll-style worries about the system of logic in Principia Mathematica. Those concerns are evident on the first page of the Notes on Logic (1913), where Wittgenstein writes that '[d]eductions only proceed according to the laws of deduction but these laws cannot justify the deduction.' (Notebooks 1914-18: p108). We find the saying/showing distinction first unveiled as the solution to this problem in the opening sentence of the Notes dictated to Moore in Norway in 1914:

'Logical so-called propositions shew [the] logical properties of language and therefore [the] Universe, but say nothing.' (Notebooks: p108).

That one can infer B from A and A -> B is not to be justified by appeal to a further rule of inference. Rather, anyone who understands the symbols involved can see that B follows from these premises. This difficult thought received its mature statement in 5.132 of the Tractatus:

'If p follows from q, I can conclude from q to p; infer p from q.
The method of inference is to be understood from the two propositions alone.
Only they can justify the inference.
Laws of inference, which - as in Frege and Russell - are to justify the conclusions, are senseless and would be superfluous.'

Tricky stuff. But the passage forms part of a pretty deep critique of the universalist conception of logic coming from Frege and Russell. The issue here is not just how inference is to be justified, though that's obviously a central and important part of Wittgenstein's concerns. In the background here is the issue of how the logical propositions are to be demarcated. For the universalist the mark of the logical is unrestricted validity and their self-evidence; from his earliest recorded philosophical remarks it is clear that Wittgenstein is starkly opposed to universalism. Logic 'must turn out to be a totally different kind than any other science' (Letter to Russell 1912, Notebooks: p120).

I should get to the point. The saying/showing distinction is the centrepiece of Wittgenstein's critique of the universalist conception of logic, and this critique had a number of really interesting and important consequences. For example, it provided grounds on which Wittgenstein could check Russell's tendency to claim that the axioms he needed to adopt to try to get his logicism to fly were logical; a crucial moment in the history of set theory, and its demarcation from logic.

Of course, as I noted above Stanley doesn't claim that the Tractatus didn't have positive influence. But here I wanted to say a little about why I disagree with his overall assessment; the Tractatus certainly has its flaws, particularly stylistic flaws, but ultimately I think it was an impressive, at times poignant, and overall beneficial contribution to 20th Century Philosophy. In any case, I strongly recommend reading Stanley's paper; I've learned a lot from it, and from thinking through these points of disagreement.

Labels: Jason Stanley, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Logic, Wittgenstein

Somehow Kenny already has a substantial post about the conference up over at Antimeta, focusing on an interesting set of questions that came up a number of times over the weekend about how we are to determine our ontological committments. This is something I have (deeply unpopular) views about, but I don't really have anything to write on that topic just now. There were some issues that got discussed in our session on Kenny's paper about the role of linguistic evidence in epistemology which I'd like to post something on sometime soon, but I'll need to give that matter more thought. I took pictures throughout the second day of the conference, which I'll post a link to as soon as I get them up on a website.

With everything that was going on this weekend, I forgot to ask Jason Stanley what he thought of the following case, and a proper post is overdue. Recall that Stanley holds the following views; IRI about knowledge (and most other epistemic notions), plus know-how is a species of know-that. According to the first thesis, whether or not a subject's true belief counts as knowledge is partly determined by the direness of being wrong, given the subject's practical interests ('The more you care, the less you know' as Stanley is reported to have put the view). According to the latter, having know-how isn't to be analysed as having a capacity or an ability of some sort, but rather as possession of a type of propositional knowledge (albeit under a 'practical mode of presentation').

In a very recent paper, Jonathan Schaffer has argued that IRI is incompatible with a certain natural and compelling picture of the 'social role of the expert'. The basic idea is that experts 'serve as a reservoir of knowledge' of a particular field, but for experts to have this status requires a certain stability; it cannot be the case that their possession of knowledge of the relevant body of information can 'fluctuate as the stakes rise and fall'.

Now for the case I want to raise (I hope the debt to Schaffer's discussion is by now clear). A bomb-disposal expert is presumably someone who knows how to diffuse and dispose of a bomb. But bomb-disposal seems like a risky-business; the consequences of getting something wrong are surely about as dire as we can imagine, supposing (as seems likely) that such an expert doesn't want to be blown to pieces. So according to IRI, a bomb-disposal expert diffusing a bomb doesn't know how to diffuse a bomb. (One might dispute whether the stakes really are high enough to force this conclusion. But throughout the literature on these issues, we are invited to conclude that losing a bet, being late for an important meeting, or failing to have enough money in your bank-account to cover a critical bill are consequences dire enough to defeat relevant knowledge attributions; getting blown up by a bomb seems sufficiently unpleasant too).

So like Schaffer, I feel there's a case to be made that IRI about knowledge does some violence to our intuitive picture of expertise. And given Stanley's other committments, it's not even an option to say that although the bomb-disposal expert loses various items of propositional knowledge, he retains some relevant know-how. (It is still an option to say that he retains some relevant set of abilities or capacities, but I expect that others will share my intuition that this does not sufficiently mitigate the conclusion that a bomb-disposal expert diffusing a bomb doesn't know how to diffuse a bomb).

(Cross-posted at Arche. Thanks to John Bengson for discussion.)

Labels: Epistemology, Jason Stanley

How is this for a pointless and annoying failure of transitivity? To get a state issued ID card, the only ID I need is my passport. To buy alcohol at H.E.B., the only ID I need is a state issued ID card. Yet my passport isn't accepted as sufficient ID to buy alcohol at H.E.B. Sigh.

I really liked Stanley's Knowledge and Practical Interests a lot, but I've been trying to figure out what he's up to in the final chapter on philosophical paradox. Stanley is generally worried by standard moves to tackle difficult philosophical issues; his examples are going fictionalist, contextualist, relativist, and attributing the seeming unacceptability of certain statements to pragmatic rather than semantic grounds. It's not that he thinks that it's always inappropriate to propose such a solution to a given problem, it's just any such proposal should appeal to special features of the target objects or concepts that explain why they in particular should be ameniable to such a treatment; any such proposal that appeals just to the (purported) availability of, say, a contextualist or fictionalist resolution is to be regarding with suspicion. Why such suspicion? Stanley seems to have an intuition (which I share to some extent) that philosophical solutions should be discriminating; we shouldn't expect solutions to seemingly disparate and deep philosophical problems - the Sorites and scepticism, for example - to be given by a standard piece of philosophical machinery that can be applied with equal success and plausibility (or lack thereof) to almost any other problem. (For Stanley's own statement of his dissatisfaction with 'catch-all' solutions, plus some discussion from myself and others, visit here.)

Now, in the final chapter of his book Stanley is keen to show that he hasn't appealed to such a catch-all method in accounting for certain intuitions we have regarding the dependence of correctness of knowledge ascriptions on features of either the attributer or the subject's circumstances. (I'm leaving that deliberately vague for now). Stanley's contention is that an account of knowledge on which whether a subject knows a given proposition can vary (even keeping their evidence for that proposition fixed) depending on their practical interests explains why we might be strongly and systematically inclined to attribute knowledge of a given proposition to a subject if the consequences of them being wrong (given their practical interests) are minor, and yet give a different verdict regarding a subject with the same evidence for whom being wrong would be disastrous. Contextualism about knowledge also seeks to respect these intuitions, but Stanley thinks that it incurs costs which his position neatly avoids.

The danger that Stanley has given a catch-all solution arises because Stanley's position stands to contextualism about knowledge just as Delia Graff's interest relative account of vague expressions stands to contextualist solutions to the Sorites. According to Graff (Shifting Sands, 2000), contra the contextualist, vague predicates like 'heap' and 'bald' express the same property throughout their respective suitably constructed Sorites series. Yet changes in the practical interests of a subject making judgements with such predicates determine shifts in their extensions (shifts not attributable to changes in the relevant comparison class, etc). A similar invariantist position stands opposed to contextualist treatments of the Liar paradox (though Stanley restricts his attention to the Sorites). The worry, then, is that interest-relative invariantism (IRI) is not one jot more discriminating about which philosophical problems are amenable to the kind of treatment it offers than contextualism.

Stanley takes one of the lessons of his cool little Analysis paper from 2003 criticising both contextualist and Graff's solutions to the Sorites to be that IRI isn't a catch-all solution. The argument is just that his criticisms of Graff's view show that the Sorites isn't in fact amenable to an IRI treatment. But to finally get to my worry, I don't see how problems with Graff's account in any way show that IRI isn't a catch-all solution. Stanley takes contextualism to be one of the paradigms of such a solution, but he doesn't think there's a good contextualist solution to the Sorites either in the offing either. So I'm just not clear on how he's supposed to have shown that IRI is appropriately more discriminating than contextualism.

Update: I was working from memory yesterday, and so when I got home I checked Stanley’s book on a hunch that I was probably being unfair to him. And that’s right; Stanley does spend a little time (177-8) pointing out specific features of vague expressions that make an IRI account inapplicable which are not present in the case of knowledge attributions. But I take it this doesn’t invalidate what I said above. We want specific features of knowledge attributions that explain why they are amenable to an IRI treatment; what Stanley offers in chapter 8 are specific features of statements featuring vague predicates that make such a treatment unavailable there. In the absence of reasons for holding that these features are also present in most other candidates for an IRI treatment, it’s still hard to see on what grounds we should conclude that IRI might not be a catch-all solution after all.

Labels: Epistemology, Jason Stanley, Vagueness