In “Against Arguments from Reference”, Ron Mallon, Edouard Machery, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich (hereafter, MMNS) argue that recent experiments concerning reference undermine various philosophical arguments that presuppose the correctness of the causal-historical theory of reference. We will argue three things in reply. First, the experiments in question—concerning Kripke’s Gödel/Schmidt example—don’t really speak to the dispute between descriptivism and the causal-historical theory; though the two theories are empirically testable, we need to look at quite different data than MMNS do to decide between them. Second, the Gödel/Schmidt example plays a different, and much smaller, role in Kripke’s argument for the causal-historical theory than MMNS assume. Finally, and relatedly, even if Kripke is wrong about the Gödel/Schmidt example—indeed, even if the causal-historical theory is not the correct theory of names for some human languages—that does not, contrary to MMNS’s claim, undermine uses of the causal-historical theory in philosophical research projects.

One of the more visible recent developments in philosophical methodology is the experimental philosophy movement. On its surface, the experimentalist challenge looks like a dramatic threat to the apriority of philosophy; ‘experimentalist’ is nearly antonymic with ‘aprioristic’. This appearance, I suggest, is misleading; the experimentalist critique is entirely unrelated to questions about the apriority of philosophical investigation. There are many reasons to resist the skeptical conclusions of negative experimental philosophers; but even if they are granted—even if the experimentalists are right to claim that we must do much more careful laboratory work in order legitimately to be confident in our philosophical judgments—the apriority of philosophy is unimpugned. The kinds of scientific investigation that experimental philosophers argue to be necessary involve merely enabling sensory experiences. Although they are not enabling in the sense of permitting concept acquisition, they are enabling in another epistemically significant way that is also consistent with the apriority of philosophy.

(RP) If w is compatible with the speakers’ pragmatic presuppositions in C, then w cannot be properly ignored in C.

Pragmatic presuppositions here are meant to be understood in the Stalnakerian way. The basic idea is that there are different ways to attend to skeptical possibilities; if you just listen to a presentation of them but continue to presuppose them not to obtain, then you can still ‘properly ignore’ them. But if our common ground shifts so as to include those possibilities, then they are no longer properly ignored.

It may well be that the Rule of Presupposition does a better job with cases than does the original Rule of Attention on the whole. But it does worse in at least some cases. Consider some expression PHI, used to pick out an individual, whose felicity requires that some p be presupposed. For example, the expression “the man sitting at the table” requires it to be common ground that there is a uniquely salient man sitting at a uniquely salient table. Now consider a sentence of the form “PHI does not know q”, where p obviously entails q–e.g., “the man sitting at the table does not know that there is a table.”

Intuitively (once we’ve bought into contextualism), some such sentences can both be felicitous and vary in truth from context to context, even when discussing the same subject and proposition. For example, someone in a skeptical context might say “the man sitting at the table does not know that there is a table” truly, even as, in another, nonskeptical context, someone might say “the man sitting at the table does know that there is a table” and speak truly. This is the sort of result contextualists want to capture. But I don’t think Blome-Tillmann can capture it. Anybody who utters that sentence felicitously is in a context in which it is presupposed that there is a table. (The previous paragraph gave a recipe for coming up with lots of similar examples.) Blome-Tillman’s Rule of Presupposition, then, cannot explain the difference between the skeptical context and the nonskeptical one with respect to whether non-table-including possibilities are properly ignored. And none of Lewis’s other rules, besides the Attention one that Blome-Tillman rejects, looks well-suited to do the job either.

So I don’t think that presupposition can do the work Blome-Tillman wants it to do in articulating what possibilities are properly ignored. I still think it’s best not to get too worked up about these details, and rest content with the contextualist insight.

Here’s a naive argument against ‘knows’ contextualism. (This isn’t the Stanley argument I want to discuss; it’s part of the set-up for it.) Assume contextualism. Now suppose you’re in a nonskeptical context, and I’m in a skeptical one, and we’re both talking about me and the proposition that p, a proposition with which I stand in a pretty strong epistemic relation — one strong enough for your non-skeptical ‘knows’, but not for my skeptical ‘knows’. You say: “Jonathan knows p.” Now, according to this naive objection, I’m forced to say this:

(1) I don’t know that p, but what you said was true.

This sounds like a crazy thing to say, under the circumstances, but it looks like contextualism predicts that it should be fine.

Of course, contextualism doesn’t predict that (1) should be fine; the naive objection is naive. Contextualism avoids the felicity of this utterance by observing that it won’t be assertable for me. What you said entails p (even your nonskeptical ‘knows’ is factive). Since I’m not in a context in which “I know that what you said is true” is true, I therefore can’t assert that what you said is true. Indeed, (1) is Moore-paradoxical, or near enough, since it straightforwardly and transparently entails “I don’t know that p, but p.”

So there’s a naive objection to contextualism and a good response on the contextualist’s behalf. But Jason Stanley thinks the game isn’t over yet, for he has a tweak on the objection to make it less naive in a way that he thinks will avoid the response. Take the same set-up as before; you’re in a non-skeptical context and you say “Jonathan knows p,” and I’m in a skeptical context where “I know p” is false. Now, Jason asks, why shouldn’t I give this sentence?

(2) I don’t know that p, but if p is true, then what you said is true.

Here, the second conjunct doesn’t entail that p, so the sentence isn’t Moore-paradoxical. Insofar as (2) also sounds crazy, we have a version of the objection that isn’t susceptible to the quick response given above. (Does (2) sound crazy? Is it a natural enough sentence to generate clear intuitions? I don’t know. Let’s grant for the purpose of argument that it sucks to have to render this sentence assertible.) The contextualist, I contend, is not committed to the assertibility of (2). Although (2) is not Moore-paradoxical, because the second conjunct does not entail p, its infelicity can still be explained as a violation of the knowledge norm of assertion, since it’s second conjunct will, in the relevant cases, be unknown.

Stanley’s argument suggests that the contextualist is committed to my ‘knowing’ (that’s skeptical-standard ‘knowing’ — let’s call it KNOWING and contrast it with low-standards knowing) the second conjunct of (2). But there is no such commitment. It may well be that, for all I KNOW, p is true but I don’t know that p. Since I can’t assert what I don’t KNOW, (2)’s second conjunct is unassertable, and so therefore is (2) itself. Stanley seems to be assuming that any time I know that p, the only thing preventing me from KNOWING that I know p is failure to KNOW p. There is no reason to make this assumption, especially given the failure of the program of factorizing knowledge (in this case, knowledge) into truth and some independent conditions. So the contextualist is not forced to admit that (2) is felicitous; he has room to insist that it cannot be KNOWN, and so cannot be asserted.

This move is not ad hoc, for at least two reasons. First, that making this move allows the view to capture the intuitive datum that (2) is infelicitous is a legitimate motivation for making it. Second and more impressively, the move is supported by general principles involving quantification over relevant possibilities. I’m just going to apply Zagzebski’s recipe for Gettier cases: for any non-p-entailing condition C, modifying C by making p accidentally true will produce a Gettier case vis-a-vis p. If in my context, “I know p” is false, then there is some skeptical possibility s, relevant in my context, and uneliminated by my evidence, in which not-p. Since “Jonathan knows p” is true in your context, s is not relevant for you. Now here’s the key move. For any such s, there is another possibility, s*, saliently similar to s, in which p is accidentally true. And given plausible metasemantic principles about quantifier domain restriction, s* will be relevant if s is. That is to say, in any context in which a skeptical scenario is relevant — in any context in which there are not-p worlds consistent with the evidence — there is also a Getter scenario relevant: a scenario just like that not-p world, with just the same evidence, but where p is true. But these s* worlds are p worlds in which I don’t know p — they’re Gettier worlds. Since they’re relevant in my skeptical context and uneliminated, I can’t, therefore, KNOW that if p, then I know p. (On a strict conditional account of indicatives, it won’t even be true in my context that if p, I know p; but on any account, I at least won’t KNOW this conditional, since the conditional must at least entail the material conditional, and we’ve established that an antecedent-world that is not a consequent-world is epistemically possible. That’s enough to explain the infelicity of (2).)

An example will illustrate the intuitiveness of the constraint I am suggesting. You and I are both talking about me and the proposition that I will play cards tomorrow. I am planning to go to play poker in Atlantic City tomorrow, and we both know this. (And, as a matter of fact, let’s stipulate, I will carry out this plan.) You say, in your nonskeptical context: “Jonathan knows that he will play cards tomorrow.” But I’m in a skeptical context; “I know that I’ll play cards tomorrow” is false in my mouth, because I’m in a context in which certain skeptical possibilities are relevant. Suppose I’m treating as relevant the possibility that the weather will be horrific, so that I’ll decide not to go to Atlantic City after all. (To make your sentence plausible, we stipulate that this is a very unlikely possibility that you legitimately ignore.) So there are some relevant-for-me skeptical scenarios in which I have my actual evidence, but I don’t play cards tomorrow.

But that there are such scenarios relevant for me requires that other scenarios saliently similar also be relevant to me. The s that undermined KNOWLEDGE was a case in which the weather is terrible and I stay home and didn’t play cards; but that world is so very much like an s* in which the weather is terrible and I stay home and play cards with friends instead of at the casino. This s* possibility is a p world — I play cards in it — but if it obtained, I wouldn’t know that p, since it represents a Gettier case.

So a contexutalist can and should think that (2), like (1), should be unassertable, even if he allows that it might be true.

One final note to add: I’ve been using this move to defend contextualism, but I think it might work about as well against a parallel argument against a Jason-style ‘SSI’ kind of view. I’m not sure. “I don’t know that p, but if p, then S knows that p” might be explicable in the same kind of way: if I don’t know p, then there is some s that undermines my knowledge of p. Can we infer from this that there is also some s*, constructed by modifying s to make it accidentally p, that undermines my knowledge of the conditional? I filled in this move for the contextualist with a principle about what determines the domains of restricted quantifiers; could an SSI proponent do something similar? I’m not sure.

The obvious explanation is that it’s a contradiction: according to standard epistemic modal logic, ‘might’, in its epistemic reading, is just the dual of ‘know’. But the fallibilist of this stripe has closed off that response. What’s he say instead? Dougherty and Rysiew propose a pragmatic line: “p might be false,” they say, implicates but does not entail that there is a significant chance of not-p. And while a chance of not-p is consistent with knowledge that p, a significant chance of not-p is not. Fantl and McGrath supplement the story by suggesting that the significance of various chances can be a stakes-sensitive matter; the same possibility, with the same likelihood, can be significant if the stakes are high, and insignificant if the stakes are low.

Now I get nervous when Gricean pragmatic stories are asked to do work like this. Too often, the data don’t generalize the right ways. Here’s one problem: the pragmatic effect doesn’t seem appropriately cancelable. Consider:

It’s possible that it will rain today, but I know it won’t rain today.

The badness of this sentence is explained, on the view in question, by suggesting that the first conjunct pragmatically implicates that there is a significant chance that it will rain today. It predicts, then, that if we cancel the implication, we’re left with felicity. But this prediction is not borne out; this is still bad:

It’s possible that it will rain today, but there’s no significant chance that it will rain today, so I know it won’t rain today.

Also, there’s a point that Derek Ball raised in Jason Stanley’s seminar last week, inspired by Seth Yalcin: the infelicity of concessive knowledge attributions persists in non-assertoric contexts. “Suppose that you know it will rain today and it might not rain today.” “If you know it will rain today and it might not rain today, then you know something that might not happen.” Etc. The Gricean story is peculiar to assertions, and therefore insufficiently general.

I think there’s a better view in the same spirit. (Well, maybe in the same spirit; I’m not quite sure what the intuitive motivation behind this project is. My suggestion won’t vindicate the coherence of concessive knowledge propositions. But like I said, I’m not sure I see why anyone would want to do that.) The line we’ve been considering is one in which “there is some possibility of p” pragmatically implicates that there is some significant possibility of p. But the existential quantifier is going to have a context-sensitive domain restriction anyway. We could suppose that in the relevant contexts, we’re only quantifying only significant possibilities. Then “there is some possibility of p” would, in the relevant context, entail that there is some significant possibility of p.

On this approach, you can still get a lot of the stuff that Fantl and McGrath want. On this view, whether there is a possibility of p will depend on the stakes, since all possibilities are significant possibilities, and whether a possibility is significant depends on stakes. So their ‘impurism’ would infect ‘possibility’ talk too. (This is not a result of the view they actually offer, which I’m criticizing: they have ‘pure’ possibilities, where talk of them implicates results about ‘impure’ significant possibilities.) But the concessive knowledge attributions will be genuine contradictions.