Mostly as an afterthought, I think that if warranted assertability is factive, it makes option (c) look more attractive.

You’re right, DeRose never says that ‘S may assert Q’ is context sensitive. Did my comment suggest that he did?

Well, I guess I’m not totally sure what you were doing with your comment. I thought you were making the ‘How about this?’ suggestion as ‘How about this as an interpretation of what DeRose was up to?’, thus supporting your earlier claim that the original argument was not confused. Since DeRose doesn’t seem to think that ‘may assert’ is context-sensitive, I take it to be pretty clear that, as a matter of DeRose exegesis, that’s wrong. But maybe you were making an independent suggestion on your own behalf; if that’s the case, then I think you’re probably saying basically the same thing I’m saying in the post.

I don’t think, contrary to your last comment, that you mean to be embracing the terrible disambiguation of KAA-R3 I mentioned in my last comment. I think I wasn’t clear about it. Here’s what I meant. You said:

KAA-R3: An utterance of ‘S may assert Q’ expresses a truth just in case an utterance of ‘S knows that Q’ expresses a truth.

This can be disambiguated in two ways; the question is whether we’re meaning to hold the context fixed. If you hold it fixed, you get something equivalent to KAA-R2:

KAA-R3-fixed: In any given context C, an utterance of ‘S may assert Q’ expresses a truth in C just in case an utterance of ‘S knows that Q’ expresses a truth in C.

If you leave contexts unconstrained, you get this very weird principle:

KAA-R3-loose: An utterance of ‘S may assert Q’ expresses a truth in some context just in case an utterance of ‘S knows that Q’ expresses a truth in some context.

KAA-R3-loose doesn’t say anything about context-sensitivity, even conditional on the context-sensitivity of ‘may assert’. All it says that if ‘may assert’ is true somewhere (whether or not it’s context-sensitive), then ‘knows’ is true somewhere (whether or not it’s context-sensitive). KAA-R3-fixed, by contrast, does ensure that if one is context-sensitive, so is the other.

The main point of my post was that DeRose’s embracing of KAA-R over KAA-R2 isn’t particularly motivated, and that it raises some problems that KAA-R2 handles better. If, as I think, you intend your KAA-R3 to be KAA-R3-fixed, it sounds like you’re saying the same thing I am with respect to how to capture the knowledge norm.

But there’s only an argument for context-sensitivity of ‘knows’ here if we have good reason to think that ‘S may assert Q’ is context-sensitive. Indeed, it’s a bit disingenuous to talk as if the issue is whether we have a good argument for contextualism; if we have good reason to think that ‘S may assert Q’ is not context-sensitive, then we have a powerful argument against contextualism — it’s one that both Williamson and Hawthorne have made. So the contextualist had better (a) reject the knowledge norm, (b) reject KAA-R2 as the proper formulation of the knowledge norm, or (c) make plausible the context-sensitivity of ‘S may assert Q’. DeRose has tried to choose option (b); I’ve argued that this is not a good choice. It sounds now like you are agreeing with me.

I don’t understand KAA-R2, so I can’t say whether my proposal is equivalent to it. My proposal is very similar to your gloss on KAA-R2 (which, I take it, was more than just a “side-note” to be set aside?)

I offered KAA-R3 as a way around the third-person attributions involving an attributor/attributee context split (one in a HIGH context, the other in a LOW). I believe this is the sense in which you find it unnatractive (given contextualism). Why?

“(It also doesn’t license the inference from the context-sensitivity of the former to that of the latter.)” I’m unable to see why it would fail. Suppose that, in all contexts, ‘S is tall enough to play quarterback’ is true just in case ‘S is tall enough to play point guard’ is true. And suppose that the truth of ‘S is tall enough to play PG’ varies with context. It follows that the truth of ‘S is tall enough to play QB’ varies with context. Any reason why it would work differently for ‘S may assert P’ and ‘S knows P’?

You’re right, DeRose never says that ‘S may assert Q’ is context sensitive. Did my comment suggest that he did?

First point of confusion: is your KAA-R3 meant to be different from DeRose’s KAA-R2 or of my attempted gloss of it? I can think of two ways to interpret your KAA-R3; one makes it very unappealing, given contextualism, and the other, I think, makes it the same as KAA-R3. The reading that makes it the same as the previous version, I think, is the one where we’re restricting it to cases where the two utterances are made in the same context. The reading that makes it very unappealing does not include that implicit restriction; it just says that some utterance of the former is true just in case some utterance of the latter is. I take it this view is very unattractive. (It also doesn’t license the inference from the context-sensitivity of the former to that of the latter.)

Second point of confusion: DeRose doesn’t ever say that ‘S may assert Q’ is context-sensitive; nor do any of his examples point in that direction. And given his endorsement of KAA-R over KAA-R2, it looks a lot like he’s assuming language like that to be context-invariant.

I’m also confused about the way we’re talking about SSI, but I think I’ll save that confusion for a full post at a later date.

I don’t think it (i.e. DeRose’s 2002) was a confused argument. It’s not logically valid. But it is suggestive. And in fairness to DeRose, he has said that he had long assumed SSI was a non-starter because of its problem handling third-person attributions. (See “The Problem with Subject-Sensitive Invariantism,” PPR, March 2004, esp. p. 348.) And if SSI is false, then it does at least become difficult to see how one might resist contextualism while hanging on to KAA.

Ironically, the third-person attributions DeRose has in mind pertain to someone in a skeptical context talking about someone in a non-skeptical context. That’s just the sort of case you go on to say causes trouble for KAA-R.

How’s about this?

KAA-R3: An utterance of ‘S may assert Q’ expresses a truth just in case an utterance of ‘S knows that Q’ expresses a truth.

With that in hand, the context-sensitivity of ‘S may assert Q’ gives you context-sensitivity for ‘S knows that Q’.