Truth-assessment Methodology and the Case against the Relativist Case Against Contextualism about Deontic Modals1
J.L. Dowell
0. Introduction
Angelika Kratzer’s canonical contextualist semantics for modal
expressions has, until recently, enjoyed almost universal acceptance.
The replacement theories offered by the New Dissent have been
varied. Some have thought we need to enrich the indices truth-values
are relative to, some defending an overall, Expressivist treatment of
epistemic and deontic modals,2 others, a Relativist one.3 Others have
suggested that the semantics needs enrichment in the values
contextually supplied,4 still others, that fewer values are supplied.5
Others have argued that deontic modal expressions are not
propositional operators.6
The various challenge cases motivating this burgeoning array of
theories are united by a shared methodological practice: In each case,
proponents consider a sentence, typically briefly describe a scenario,
1 Many thanks to audiences at the 2016 St. Louis University Henle Conference, the Arche Research Centre at the University of St. Andrews, the 2016 University of Edinburgh Language Workshop, the 2016 Deontic Logic and Normative Systems conference at the University of Bayreuth, and Duke University. Thanks also to Josh Knobe, Andy Egan, Mike Rieppel, and Dave Sobel for discussion. 2 Yalcin (2007), (2011), (2015)3 Egan (2007), (2011); MacFarlane (2014).4 Cariani (2013), Cariani, Kaufmann, and Kaufmann (2013), Carr (2014), Charlow (2013), Wedgwood (2016).5 Finlay (2014).6 Schroeder (2011), Wedgwood (2006) & (2007).
1
and then report a judgment about the truth or warrant of asserting that
sentence in that scenario. The default evidential status accorded
these judgments is a constraining one: It is assumed that, to be
plausible, a semantic hypothesis must vindicate the reported
judgments in the scenario as described. Fully assessing the extent to
which these cases do generate data that puts pressure on the
canonical view, then, requires an understanding of this methodological
practice. A few questions are:
1. What assumptions underlie reliance on assessments as a source of data that properly plays such an evidential role?
2. How plausible are those assumptions? 3. Under what conditions are such assessments reasonably treated
as probative in the envisioned way for the purposes of semantic theorizing?
Although the focus here is on the modals literature and, in
particular, John MacFarlane’s recent challenge to contextualism about
deontic modals, answers to these questions are of far more general
interest, as reliance on this methodological practice is widespread in
the semantics literature both in linguistics and the philosophy of
language.7
The central claims defended here are:
1. Not all assessments are fit to play the evidential role they are standardly accorded in the literature.
2. To play that role, we need good reason to think that speakers’ assessments can be reasonably expected to be reliable in cases of the relevant type.
7 See, for example, debates on the semantics of indicative and counterfactual conditionals, attitude verbs, definite descriptions, and names.
2
3. Minimally, having such grounds requires that the points of evaluation (context, index pairs) against which assessors assess for truth or warrant are characterized non-defectively (in a sense to be spelled out further below).
4. Assessing John MacFarlane’s (2014) central challenge case to contextualism about deontic modals in light of this constraint shows that his judgments do not have the evidential significance he accords them.
5. For those assessments to have that significance, that case needs to be characterized non-defectively.
6. However, once it is characterized non-defectively, none of the resulting range of cases provides data that cannot be accommodated by a suitably flexible Kratzer-style contextualism about modals.
The structure of the paper is as follows: 1.0 introduces a flexible
version of Kratzer’s contextualist theory as a sample target theory
against which to assess MacFarlane’s challenge. 2.0 provides an
overview of MacFarlane’s challenge, highlighting the crucial role
played by the assumption that our judgments about the case he
sketches are reasonably accorded the default evidential status of
constraining a semantic theory to vindicate them. Section 3.1
outlines the assumptions (Recognition of Meaning and Recognition
of Circumstances) which would underwrite according such
judgments that default evidential role. In 3.2, the limitations of
those assumptions are introduced by consideration of cases in
which they are not reasonable (e.g. Going Out, Unknown
Student, and Unclear Intention, below). I then show how the
limitations illustrated by those cases extends to a deontic modal
case (Surgery). 4.0 draws several preliminary conclusions
concerning the features of cases that can be expected to elicit
3
unreliable judgments, while 5.0 provides a positive account of the
constraints elicitation conditions must meet in order for speaker
judgments to properly play the evidential role standardly accorded
them in the literature. 6.0 revisits MacFarlane’s challenge. In 6.1, I
show that the characterization of the case intended to elicit the
judgments he reports does not satisfy those constraints. This
means that, even if those judgments were widely shared, they
would not have the evidential status he accords them. That said,
6.2 presents experimental results confirming a conjecture of Dowell
(2013) that respondents do not uniformly share the judgments
MacFarlane reports in cases of the kind he holds are especially
problematic for the contextualist. 7.0 draws a second round of
preliminary conclusions about the status of MacFarlane’s challenge.
Finally, 8.0 provides a contextualist-friendly explanation of the total
pattern of responses, both of those who share MacFarlane’s
judgments and the experimental data.
1.0 Flexible Contextualism
Before introducing MacFarlane’s challenge, it will be helpful to
have a sample target contextualist theory on the table. In a series of
papers, I’ve defended Flexible Contextualism, a view which combines
Kratzer’s formal semantics with an account of how it is that contexts
supply the parameter values needed to determine a proposition
4
expressed.8 Here I sketch only those aspects of the full view necessary
to make good on the central claims here, with this section introducing
the Kratzerian framework, leaving the question of how modal
propositions get determined as a function of the context of utterance
for later discussion.
In Krazter’s framework, modal expressions function as quantifiers
over possibilities. Expressions like “necessarily”, “must”, “have to”,
“should”, and “ought” all function as universal quantifiers, while
“possibly”, “might”, “may” and “can” function as existential ones.9
Deontic modals take restricted domains, determined by two,
contextually supplied, conversational backgrounds. The first is a modal
base, f, a function from a world to a set of possibilities, called “the
modal background”. Following Kratzer, I here (and elsewhere) assume
that the value for f in the case of deontic modals is circumstantial;
roughly, the value for f at a context will be a property a circumstance
must have in the world of evaluation w to be in the domain-restricting
set. The modal background will then be the set worlds compatible with
those circumstances. Second, the ordering source, g, induces a
8 Dowell (2011), (2012), and (2013) and Bronfman and Dowell (2016) and forthcoming. 9Kratzer (2012). Some have defended the claim that there are important, lexical differences between “must” and “have to”, on the one hand, and “ought” and “should” on the other (or still more precise distinctions between “must” and “have to”). (See, for example, Silk (xxxx).) In giving “must” and “ought” a single lexical treatment here, I do not mean to be taking a stand on this issue. Rather, this issue is orthogonal to the ones raised here.
5
preorder on the modal background. g is a function from a world to
(what I’ll call) a “standard”. A standard ranks worlds in the modal
background in terms of how well they meet that standard. The worlds
in the modal background that are best, relative to that standard, make
up the worlds in the modal’s domain. I further assume here (as
elsewhere) that when deontic modal sentences are information-
sensitive, that is due to facts about the ordering source.10 “Must ” will
then be true at a point of evaluation when every world in the domain
supplied at that point is a -world, while “may ” will be true when
some world is.
2.0 MacFarlane’s Challenge
In contrast to the contextualist, relativists hold that modal
expressions are not a source of context-sensitivity. But, in contrast to
standard invariantists, relativists also hold that the truth-value of
modal sentences are not relative simply to worlds, but to more
enriched indices. According to MacFarlane, the truth of deontic modal
sentences in particular are relative at least to world, information pairs.
As he notes, these features of the semantics do not yet make his view
distinctively relativisit. To do that, we need to add a postsemantics
according to which the truth of a deontic modal sentence at a point of
evaluation is determined by features of the context of assessment, i.e.
the context at which the use of such a sentence is assessed.11
10 For details, see Dowell (2013) and Bronfman and Dowell (2016).11 For details, see MacFarlane (2014).
6
His argument against contextualism depends on the claim that
no contextualist semantics can fit with our judgments in cases
involving extracontextual, third-party assessments. To arrive at that
conclusion, he begins by sketching an outline of such a case, reporting
his judgments, and briefly explaining the problem he sees for the
contextualist. He writes,
Suppose I am about to bet on a race you know is fixed…my evidence [suggests that] Blue Blazer is [the horse] more likely to win than Exploder. You know, though, that my evidence is incomplete and misleading: although Blue Blazer has done better in the past, tonight he will be suffering the effects of a drug. So if I ask your advice, you will say that I ought to bet on Exploder.
[Now] suppose [instead] that when I said “I ought to bet on Blue Blazer”, I did not know of your presence. Suppose that you were a stranger, eavesdropping on my soliloquy from behind a bush. Even in such a case, it makes sense for you to think I’m wrong and to say, “No, you ought to bet on Exploder.” Surely it is not plausible that the force of my original assertion was that the appropriate thing to do in light of my information at the time and of any information possessed by anyone who might overhear or later consider my claim, was to bet on Blue Blazer. I had no warrant for an assertion that strong.” (MacFarlane 2014: 284-85.)
In order to better understand the challenge MacFarlane intends,
it will be helpful to elaborate on these sketchy remarks to generate a
case we can ask for ordinary speaker reactions to without the noise
introduced by his interspersed, dialectical commentary.
Blue Blazer
7
Suppose Ian is planning to bet on one of two horses in a race,
Blue Blazer or Exploder. Ian knows that, in the past, Blue Blazer has
proven herself the faster horse. In light of this, he concludes,
(BLAZER) I ought to bet on Blue Blazer.12
Unbeknownst to Ian, though, Lila is eavesdropping on his soliloquy
from behind a bush. Unlike Ian, Lila knows that today Blue Blazer will
be suffering the effects of a drug. Suppose she says to herself in
response,
(EXPLODER) No, you ought to bet on Exploder.
According to MacFarlane, in cases like this, both utterances are
warranted and EXPLODER expresses clear disagreement with the truth
of what Ian has said. MacFarlane also suggests that our sense of such
cases is that Ian and Lila are “addressing a single question” (2014:
285). Finally, MacFarlane seems to assume that we regard at least
what Lila has said as true. For ease of exposition, I’ll sometimes call
these “the MacFarlane judgments”.
How are these judgments to present a challenge to
contextualism? Though he does not say so explicitly, MacFarlane’s
reasoning presupposes that these judgments are correct. A successful
semantics must not only fit with, for example, our sense that each
speaker is warranted in saying what they do; it must assign a
proposition expressed to each of BLAZER and EXPLODER that renders
12 To help with tracking, here I adopt a convention of using bold for the names of cases and CAPITALS for names of utterances.
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each warranted. In other words, MacFarlane presupposes that a
plausible package of semantic and postsemantic hypotheses must
vindicate these judgments.13
This is the assumption I’ll challenge below. To see the role it
plays in MacFarlane’s objection, we’ll need to examine more closely his
reasoning for the conclusion that no contextualist theory can
accommodate these judgments. His argument is by process of
elimination. He considers various values the contextualist might hold
are contextually supplied and then argues that none of these
candidate values fits with our full range of judgments. Suppose, for
example, that the contextualist holds that whenever a speaker utters
“I ought to ”, whether what she’s said is true depends upon whether
-ing is best in light of her information. That hypothesis fails,
according to MacFarlane, because, if correct, it would mean that Ian
and Lila are not disagreeing over the truth of what Ian has said
(MacFarlane 2014: 284). Note, though, that this consequence of that
hypothesis is only a bug—rather than merely a feature of the view--if
our sense that they are disagreeing about a common question is
reasonably presumed correct. If that judgment is unreliable, it cannot
place the envisioned constraint on a semantic hypothesis and hence
13 For ease of exposition, I will sometimes write as if the needed constraint is a constraint on the semantics only. However, it should be remembered that, for the MacFarlane-style relativist, a postsemantics is needed to determine a truth-value at a point of evaluation.
9
no pressure on the hypothesis that what Ian and Lila each say is
relative to their own information.
The second hypothesis MacFarlane considers on the
contextualist’s behalf is that such utterances depend for their truth on
whether -ing is best relative to some shared body of information, such
as that shared by interlocutors (Ibid.). Against this hypothesis he
writes, “it is not plausible that the force of [Ian’s] original assertion was
that the appropriate thing to do in light of [his] information at the time
and of any information possessed by anyone who might overhear or
later consider my claim, was to bet on Blue Blazer. [Ian] had no
warrant for an assertion that strong”. But this consequence of the
hypothesis only presents a difficulty for it on the assumption that Ian is
in fact warranted in this case. The sole grounds MacFarlane offers for
thinking this is our judgment. So (assuming for now for the sake of
argument that MacFarlane correctly characterizes our judgments about
the case), the envisioned consequence of that hypothesis only poses a
difficulty for it if it’s a constraint on a semantic hypothesis that it
vindicate the MacFarlane judgments. (To underscore, I am not
defending either of these two readings of the utterances. Rather, I am
merely highlighting an assumption on which MacFarlane’s reasoning
for his conclusion depends.)
In section 6.1 I will identify two different contextualist readings
that would vindicate the MacFarlane judgments, neither of them
10
readings he considers. So, he is wrong to say that this cannot be done.
However, this is not the most fundamental difficulty with his challenge.
The most fundamental difficulty, as we’ll see, is that his judgments do
not have the probative value his challenge presupposes.
3.0 Methodology for Semantic Theorizing: The Evidential Role of Assessments3.1 Strong Data and the Basic Triangulation Strategy
As we’ve just seen, MacFarlane’s reasoning presupposes that the
judgments he reports place a default, constraining role on a plausible
package of semantic and postsemantic hypotheses to vindicate them.
Assumptions of this kind are not unusual. Indeed, speakers’
assessments of sentences as true/false or felicitous/odd are frequently
accorded such a constraining role on semantic theorizing. Sometimes,
as MacFarlane does, theorists also accord judgments about
warrant/lack of warrant or about the goodness or badness of an
inference such status.14 It will be helpful to have a name for this
default, constraining role, to distinguish it from a weaker, explanatory
one. Let ‘Strong Data’ be any widespread and firm judgment by
competent speakers that is properly treated as placing a constraint on
a semantic theory to vindicate that judgment. Truth-assessments are
strong data, then, when the constraint they place is for semantic
14 Such judgments are regularly appealed to in the recent literature on epistemic modals. See, for example, von Fintel and Gilles (2011), MacFarlane (2011?), and Lennertz (2014) For discussion somewhat critical of that practice, see Dowell (2011). For discussions that accord our judgments about inferences that role, see Caraini, Carr, and Charlow.
11
hypotheses to render those assessments correct. This evidential role
contrasts with a weaker one that allows for the possibility of speaker-
error. Call “Data” any pattern of judgments by competent speakers
that is properly treated as placing a constraint on a semantic theory to
fit with an independently well-motivated (i.e. non-ad hoc) explanation
of that pattern. Such a constraint is weaker than the former, since
explanations of a pattern may be either vindicating or debunking.
As we’ve seen, MacFarlane’s objection to contextualism about
deontic modals depends upon the default presumption that the
judgments he reports are Strong Data, rather than merely Data, in this
sense. Assessing that default presumption requires an understanding
of when such presumptions are in general justified. The questions we
need answers to are:
1. What assumptions underlie the practice of treating speakers’
assessments as Strong Data?
2. What justifies those assumptions?
3. What does that justification tell us about when it is—and isn’t
—reasonable to treat speakers’ assessments as Strong Data?
Although the practice is much more frequently implicitly deployed
than explicitly defended, there are a few sketched defenses to be
found in the recent linguistics literature.15 Fleshing those sketches out
15 See, for example, Portner (2005) and Mathewson (2004). 12
a bit yields what I’ll call “the Basic Triangulation Strategy” (BTS), made
up of three assumptions:
(i) Linguistic competence confers an ability to reliably identify those aspects of meaning that contribute to the determination of truth. (Call this assumption “Recognition of Meaning”.)
(ii) Competent speakers are able to recognize when circumstances suffice to settle truth-value. (Call this “Recognition of Circumstances”.)
(iii) Speakers, when they recognize those aspects of meaning that contribute to the determination of truth and circumstances that suffice to settle truth-value, will work out that truth-value. (Call this assumption “Triangulation”.)
Although this strategy tells us under what conditions our truth-
assessments are reasonably treated as Strong Data, it does not tell us
when it is reasonable to so treat judgments of warrant, which, as we’ve
seen, play a crucial role in MacFarlane’s challenge. Unfortunately, I
know of no place in the literature in the philosophy of language or
linguistics which justifies according judgments of warrant such an
evidential role. (And, interestingly, I know of no place a linguist
accords them such a role.) However, there is a bit we might say in
defense of this practice in light of the above. We might suppose, for
example, that when speakers are in a position to work out the truth of
a sentence at a point of evaluation they are also in a position to
appreciate that asserting that sentence at that point is epistemically
reasonable. The idea would be that, when they are in a position to
work out a sentence’s truth, this is because they have information that
would also make believing that sentence’s content at that point of
evaluation reasonable. In this way, the basic BTS might be extended
13
to, at least prima facie, underwrite MacFarlane’s assumption about the
evidential status of his warrant-assessments.
3.2 The Basic Triangulation Strategy: Its Justification and
Limitations
This picture has two nice features. First, it explains what grounds
the widespread practice of treating speaker judgments, especially
truth-assessments, as placing a constraint on semantic hypotheses to
vindicate them. Second, it identifies the conditions that must be met
in order for such judgments to properly play that constraining
evidential role. For speakers who are either not in a position to
recognize those aspects of meaning that contribute to the
determination of truth-value or able to recognize circumstances that
suffice to settle truth-value will not be in a position to correctly
triangulate. And the judgments of speakers not in a position to
correctly triangulate are not Strong Data.
To illustrate these ideas, let’s start with a very simple,
uncontroversial example of how such a failure might occur. Then we’ll
identify the source of failure, since that will help us see how similar
failures can occur in more complicated cases involving modals. That,
in turn, will get us ready to consider MacFarlane’s case and what sort
of challenge, if any, it presents to contextualist views.
3.2.1 The Limitations of the BTS: The Case of Pure Indexicals
14
To find an uncontroversial example of such a failure, it will be
helpful to consider the use of a term whose semantics is widely
regarded as settled. Since the hypothesis under investigation is that
deontic modals are context-sensitive, it would be helpful for our term
to be uncontroversially context-sensitive. Finally, since MacFarlane’s
challenge case involves eavesdroppers, let’s throw those in as well.
Going Out
Imagine that Colin and Ian are eavesdropping on Lila and Emma in
the next room as they discuss their plans for the evening. They hear
one girl tell the other,
(PLANS) I’m going out with friends for pizza tonight.
Colin, who chatted with Emma earlier about her evening plans, says to
Ian,
(PLANS-false) That’s not true; Emma told me she’s staying home
to study.
Unbeknownst to Colin, though, it’s Lila talking, not Emma; the sisters
sound more alike to his ear than he realizes. And what Lila said is true
—she will be going out with friends. Colin’s failure in this type of case is
well-understood in the literature on indexicals. Here Colin knows which
feature someone has to have in order for her to be the one who’s
evening plans are at-issue; she needs to be the person who uttered
PLANS. Since he thinks he knows who has this feature, he thinks he
15
knows which proposition PLANS expresses. But since he’s wrong about
who that is, he’s wrong about which proposition that is.
Moreover, in important respects, Colin’s assessment is
reasonable. He’s got good reason to suppose, we may imagine, that
he can tell the difference between Lila’s voice and Emma’s. So, he’s
got good reason to think he knows which proposition PLANS expresses.
And, given his understanding of which proposition that is and his
grounds for his view about what the world is like (namely, that Emma
will spend the evening studying), he’s got good reason to assess
PLANS as false. Nonetheless, he is wrong to do so; PLANS is true.
Moreover, it’s clear here what the source of the problem is: Though
Colin is doing his bit, the world isn’t cooperating. That is to say,
although Colin has the skill needed to know how the proposition PLANS
expresses depends upon what the world is like and has good reason to
think he knows what the world is like in the relevant respects (he has
reason to think that it’s Emma talking), he’s wrong about what those
respects are (Lila is talking), in a way that makes a difference to his
ability to assess whether the proposition expressed is true. Since the
source of Colin’s error is ignorance about a feature of the context of
utterance that makes a difference to what’s said, I’ll call this source
“Ignorance of the Context”.
3.2.2 Limitations of the BTS: The Case of Flexible Context-
Sensitive Expressions
16
“I” is as clear a case of what Kaplan calls a “pure” indexical as any
we’ll find in the English language. A hallmark of a pure indexical is
that the feature an item must have in order to be the item supplied by
context to the determination of a proposition is the same in every
context; in the case of “I”, context supplies whichever individual
tokened it. Other expressions are more flexibly context-sensitive.
Flexibly context-sensitive expressions are those such that which
property an item (e.g. property or individual) has to have in order to be
the one context supplies itself varies with context. Quantifiers over
individuals are good candidates for being context-sensitive in this way.
Since the hypothesis under investigation (Flexible Contextualism) is
that deontic modal expressions are flexibly context-sensitive in this
sense, it will be helpful to see how failures of the kind we’re interested
in can arise in the case of their use. (On that hypothesis, too, modal
expressions function as quantifiers. So, that is a second advantage of
our example.) As we’ll see, their flexibility, in contrast to pure
indexicals, gives rise to a second possible source of failure.
We need one additional piece of background information to fully
appreciate what’s
going on in our illustrations of our two types of failure. Elsewhere I’ve
suggested that, in the case of flexibly context-sensitive expressions,
speakers’ publicly manifestable intentions have a role to play in
determining which property, at a context, an item must have in order
17
to be the one supplied by that context (Dowell 2011). We may model
this idea using Stalnaker’s notion of a Common Ground. The Common
Ground is the set of propositions presupposed by interlocutors for the
purposes of their conversation. Some propositions are added to the
Common Ground by the acceptance of assertions into the
conversational record. Others are added in other ways, for example,
by representing salient features of the environment or facts it is
reasonable to assume conversational participants presuppose. Such
features provide important clues to participants’ presumptive states of
minds, their attitudes and ends. Propositions representing those states
of mind will, in turn, also be in the Common Ground. (How, exactly,
we’re able to work out which such propositions it is rational to add is
an interesting question. But there is a good deal of evidence that
we’re able to do so.16)
My suggestion is that non-defective contexts supply the needed
parameter values for flexibly context-sensitive expressions by
manifesting appropriate speaker intentions. An illustration of how this
works in a non-defective case will helpful. As mentioned above,
quantifiers over individuals are plausibly flexibly context-sensitive
expressions--on a standard semantics for quantified statements,
context supplies a property an individual in the circumstances of
16 See, for example, Bloom (2002) on the role the acquisition of a Theory of Mind has in language-learning.
18
evaluation must have in order to be in the domain of quantification,17
where which property a property needs to have in order to be the one
supplied itself varies with context.18
Students
Imagine now a professor discussing a perceptually salient stack of
exams she is about to grade with a colleague. She says,
(FAIL) “No student will fail the exam.”
The propositions in this conversation’s Common Ground will include
that the perceptually salient exams are under discussion and that
those exams are for a particular course the professor is currently
teaching. Additional propositions about what human beings are like
and that our professor is not unusual in those regards are together
able to manifest her intention to be talking about, not all students
everywhere at any time, but only those in the course in which the
exam under discussion was administered. Thus, the Common Ground
is able to manifest her intention to be talking about students in that
class and the domain restricting property, being a student in the
[relevant] class, is contextually supplied.
Call the requirement that contexts are capable of manifesting a
speaker’s domain-determining intention “the Publicity Constraint” (or
“Publicity”). In this example, the context satisfies Publicity and so is
17 See, for example, Bianchi (2006) and Stanley and Szabo (2000).18 For example, a domain-restricting property might be supplied by being perceptually sailient or by being conversationally salient. (For illustration and discussion, see Dowell (2013).)
19
capable of determining a unique proposition expressed.19 As we’ll see
below, Publicity failures make room for the possibility of truth-
assessment errors through Ignorance of Context. In fact, such
expressions allow for the possibility of two distinct possible sources of
mistaken assessments, Ignorance of Context being only one.
It will be easiest to introduce the second source of error first,
which, for reasons that will soon become clear, I’ll call “Ignorance of
the Domain”.
Unknown Student
Let’s fill out our exam case a bit. Suppose that, unbeknownst to
the professor, a struggling student she thought had dropped the class
did not, took the exam, and gave no correct answers. Here, while she
knows which property a student has to have in order to be within the
domain of quantification, she is wrong about which students in the
circumstances of evaluation have that property. As in the case Going
Out, here too a speaker may very reasonably, but mistakenly, judge
her utterance true, when it is false.
This illustrates one possible source of error associated with
flexibly context-sensitive terms: An assessor knows which property
context supplies as the domain-determining one, but fails to know
which individuals have that property. In such a case, an assessor is
wrong about which aspects of the world are relevant for determining
19 “Unique”, that is, compatible with the general phenomenon of linguistic vagueness.
20
the truth-value of her utterance and so is unable to triangulate on that
truth-value. (We might call the source of such an error “Ignorance of
Circumstances”. But since there are different ways an assessor might
be mistaken about what the circumstances of evaluation20 are in a way
that undermines the reliability of their assessment, it will be more
precise to call this source “Ignorance of the Domain”. Since the theory
we’re testing MacFarlane’s challenge against is one on which modals
function as quantifiers, this term will fit well enough parallel modal
cases, even though it isn’t naturally suggestive of all sources of error
of the same type.21)
As we’ve noted, in contrast to pure indexicals, flexibly context-
sensitive expressions are flexible as to the property an item must have
in order to be the value supplied by context. In the case of quantifiers,
this will manifest as variation in the property a property must have in
order to be the one supplied by context that an individual in the
circumstances of evaluation must have in order to be in the domain. A
second possible source of error in the case of flexibly context-sensitive
expressions, then, is that assessors may be mistaken about which
20 By “circumstances of evaluation” I just here mean whatever it is that determines an index—this could be a world, a centered world, or one of these with an additional parameter value, e.g. a body of information.21 For example, if Kaplan is right, a context might select the property of being the individual depicted in the picture behind the speaker as the property an individual must have in order to be the individual denoted by an occurrence of “that”, while being wrong about which individual is so denoted. We might more precisely call such a source “Ignorance of the Denotation”.
21
domain-restricting property context selects (or about whether it has
selected a unique such property). Such cases will involve the same
Ignorance of the Context illustrated in Going Out. But, the flexibility
in the property a property must have in order to be the one supplied
by context found in FCS expressions, in contrast to pure indexicals,
means that, as a practical matter, it is much easier for such errors to
arise. One way it can arise is through a failure of Publicity.
To see how such a case might arise, consider a variation on
Unknown Student.
Unclear Intention
Suppose the professor above teaches two classes, a graduate-level
logic class she’s just discussed with her colleague, and an
undergraduate, introductory class. The stack of exams for the latter
are in plain sight. Let’s suppose that the professor and her colleague
both presuppose that the former has two classes and that the graduate
class has been recently under discussion. Suppose in addition that the
professor believes that they have both seen the perceptually salient
stack of undergraduate exams and that they each presuppose this as
well. Suppose also that the professor intends to be discussing the
students who are in the undergraduate class and that she believes
she’s made this intention plain by tipping her head in the direction of
the clearly visible exam stack as she utters FAIL. Suppose, though,
that her colleague has not noticed her gesture.
22
Here the propositions that the professor has two courses and that
the graduate class was recently under discussion are both in the
Common Ground. But the proposition that she has indicated the stack
of exams while speaking is not. Given this, there are two distinct
possibilities compatible what’s conversationally presupposed. Either
the professor intends to be talking about the students with the
property being in her graduate course or those with the property being
in her undergraduate course. The first property would be supplied by a
context in which conversational salience could be relied upon to
manifest her intention to be talking about the student in the graduate
course, while the latter would be selected were perceptual salience
able to manifest her intention to be talking about her undergraduates.
Here the context is compatible two different properties a property
might have in order to be the domain-restricting one supplied. That is,
there are worlds in the Common Ground in which the speaker’s
intentions are manifested by the property being a student in the
graduate class being made salient by its having the property of being a
property recently made conversationally salient and those in which
they are manifested by the property of being a student in her
undergraduate course being made salient by its having the property of
being a property that is perceptually salient.
The failure here is a violation of Stalnaker’s third principle of
rational communication, that “the same proposition is expressed
23
relative to each world in the context set”.22 In such a case, an assessor
may be mistaken about what, if anything, has been said and so be
mistaken about whether what is said is true. (In Unclear Intention,
for example, her colleague may incorrectly assess FAIL as true or false
based her knowledge of how Professor’s graduate students are faring.)
These examples give us our first lesson: In the case of flexibly
contextualist expressions, the dual role the world plays in determining
what has to be the case in order for an utterance to be true gives rise
to two distinct sources of unreliable assessments. One role it plays is
contextual: It provides the materials for shared presuppositions which
may supply the needed property by satisfying Publicity. When the
world fails to provide the materials needed to play that contextual role,
as Unclear Intention illustrates, assessors may fail to identify the
intended property, making their assessments unreliable and so not
Strong Data.
Second, the world has a role to play in determining which items, as
a function of the circumstances of evaluation (aka ‘the index’) have the
contextually supplied property and so are in the domain of
quantification. As Unknown Student illustrates, when an assessor is
mistaken about which individuals have that property, she will be
mistaken about which ones are in the domain of quantification, and so
about what features of the world are determinative of an utterance’s
22 Stalnaker (1999) pp. 88-90. 24
truth-value. Here too speaker assessments can be expected to be
unreliable and so are not Strong Data.
How does this lesson help us think about the case of deontic modal
expressions? Recall that on the hypothesis I defend here and
elsewhere, Flexible Contextualism, modals expressions are quantifiers
over possibilities, with (typically) restricted domains, where those
restrictions get determined flexibly as a function of the context of
utterance. Deontic modal sentences have their domains determined
relative to two conversational backgrounds: First, to a set of worlds
compatible with a set of circumstances (f(w)) and second, to the set of
best such worlds, given some standard for evaluating worlds, g(w). To
see how, on such a view, there is room for failures of the types just
discussed, note that speakers may be mistaken about the value for f,
g, f(w), or g(w). In such cases, speakers will be mistaken either about
which proposition has been expressed or about which features of the
world are determinative of that proposition’s truth-value. Using the
terminology introduced earlier, we might call “Ignorance of the
Context” assessment-failures that stem from mistakes about f or g and
“Ignorance of the Domain” failures that stem from mistakes about the
value for f(w), or g(w).
Consider an example of one such failure for illustrative purposes.
Surgery
25
Imagine a speaker, Maria, who intends to speak to the question of
whether having surgery is best for John’s health, in light of what’s
known by local medical experts. She’s in a room with several
individuals dressed in a variety of medical garb. All of the local experts
are in the room. But she’s mistaken about which individuals are the
experts—one such individual, who has not yet spoken, she mistakes for
a nurse. Since everyone she knows to be an expert has spoken, she
thinks she’s in a position to form a reasonable judgment about what
would be best for John’s health, given what’s known by the local
experts. But, since she incorrectly identifies who is and isn’t a medical
expert, she incorrectly identifies what has to be the case for her
utterance,
(SURGERY) John ought to have the surgery
to be true.
There is an important sense is which such a speaker may be
perfectly reasonable. Suppose Maria is reasonable to think that the
expert dressed in scrubs is a nurse, rather than a doctor. In that case,
she is reasonable to think she has all of the information she needs in
order to know whether what she’s said is true. But, though
reasonable, she’s wrong about this. In order to accurately assess the
truth of SURGERY, she needs to know what the remaining expert
26
thinks. So, her assessment is not Strong Data. (This is in some ways
similar to the failure illustrated with Unknown Student, above.)23
This illustration brings us to our second lesson. According to the
Flexible Contextualist, someone may be a competent speaker yet fail
to appreciate their failure to recognize what’s determinative of the
truth of a modal utterance in a way that makes a difference to the
reliability of their assessment. In those cases, she may find herself
incorrectly opinionated about the truth-value of a modal utterance or
about the epistemic reasonableness of asserting its content.
Assessments in such cases cannot be reasonably treated as Strong
Data.
This last conclusion may seem too hasty. After all, so far, I’ve
merely illustrated how such an error might arise, on the assumption
that Flexible Contextualism is true. So, isn’t the correct conclusion
rather that, according to the Flexible Contextualist, such assessments
are not Strong Data (and so can’t be reasonably treated as such)? To
23 Here we have an example of an information-sensitive deontic modal. Elsewhere, I’ve argued that these are best captured in a Kratzerian framework by bringing the needed information-sensitivity into the ordering source. Here, context selects a value for g the option that’s best for John’s health, given the information had in w by the medical experts who are local to the context. In Surgery, Maria knows this, but fails to know which individuals have that property and so, in an important sense fails to know which body of information is relevant for determining the truth of what she’s said. Here we have a mixed case. Failure to know which individuals are local experts is a kind of Ignorance of the Context, while failure to know which body of information is had by those individuals in w is, in the terminology used here, a kind of Ignorance of the Domain.
27
think about this issue, let’s back up a bit and consider what is required
for speakers’ judgments to play an evidential role in rationally deciding
between semantic hypotheses. In order to play such a role, a
judgment’s standing to play it must not presuppose the falsity one of
those hypotheses. Call this constraint on an observation’s standing as
good evidence “the Neutrality Constraint” (or “Neutrality”). Since the
evidential role of interest here is the Strong Data-role, it will be helpful
to see why this constraint is needed and how in operates in terms of a
particular example in which it isn’t met and it is a judgment’s standing
as Strong Data that is at-issue between two rival hypotheses.
Consider a familiar semantic hypothesis according to which
“water” is a device for direct reference, rigidly designating H2O.
Suppose we are interested in testing this hypothesis against a rival,
Fregean semantics. In order to test this hypothesis, we ask ordinary,
competent speakers of English whether the sentence (WATER) “there’s
water in this bottle” is true or false in the following scenario: We show
them a bottle and inform them that it is filled with a liquid made up of
molecules of two hydrogen and one oxygen atom.
Imagine also that our ordinary speakers are chemically naïve;
they think that water is an element. As expected, they assess the
sentence as false at the stipulated point of evaluation. Is that
assessment Data? Or Strong Data? Suppose the Fregean claims that
it’s Strong Data. This is good for the Fregean! In that case, that
28
assessment places a constraint on a semantic hypothesis for “water”
to vindicate it. According the direct reference theory, the sentence is
true at the stipulated point of evaluation. So, if our speakers’ false-
assessment is Strong Data, it is some good grounds for rejecting that
theory. Clearly, something has gone wrong with the Fregean’s
reasoning. A fan of direct reference is able to easily explain why
ordinary speakers would be unable to accurately assess WATER at the
stipulated point of evaluation: According to that theory, competence
with natural kind terms, such as “water”, does not require knowledge
of which natural kind their usage tracks. Given this, it is to be
expected that speakers will not infrequently be unable to recognize the
truth-value of sentences containing such terms.
To assume that speakers’ judgments in the imagined scenario
are nonetheless Strong Data is, then, in effect to presuppose the falsity
of one of the hypotheses those judgments are to decide between. And
that is incompatible with playing the evidential role of rationally
deciding between theories.
This is not to say that these judgments have no evidential role to
play in deciding between semantic theories for “water”. Treating these
judgments as Data, and so in need of an explanation, does not
presuppose the falsity of either contending hypothesis. If one
hypothesis were incompatible with a plausible explanation of the
imagined pattern of judgments, that would put pressure on that
29
hypothesis. We can now say: To treat assessments in a case like
Surgery as Strong Data when deciding between semantic hypotheses
one of which is Flexible Contextualism is a violation of Neutrality and
hence dialectically illicit.
4.0 Preliminary Conclusions: Round I
Putting these all of the thoughts introduced in section 3.0
together allows us to arrive at a few preliminary conclusions.
1. An assessment is only Strong Data when the assumptions
Recognition of Meaning and Recognition of Circumstances are
reasonable.
2. Flexibly context-sensitive expressions, by their nature, give
rise to the possibility of cases in which each of these
assumptions is not reasonable.
3. Recognition of Meaning is not reasonable in a case in which
speakers are unable to recognize a needed, contextually
supplied value (as illustrated by Unclear Intention).
4. Recognition of Circumstances is not reasonable in cases in
which speakers are unable to recognize which features the
world must have in order to determine the truth of an
utterance (as illustrated by Unknown Student) or the
epistemic warrant of asserting its content.
5. To reasonably be treated as Strong Data for the purposes of
deciding between two (or more) semantic hypotheses, an
30
assessment’s standing as Strong Data must not presuppose
the falsity of one (or more) of the hypotheses at-issue (as
illustrated by the water example). (That is, the Neutrality
Constraint must be met.)
6. On at least one contending hypothesis, Flexible
Contextualism, deontic modals are flexibly context-sensitive.
This means that meeting Neutrality requires that, to be Strong
Data, assessments must be generated under conditions in
which both Recognition of Meaning and Recognition of
Circumstances are reasonable, at least in those ways in which
they are not in Unknown Student, Unclear Intention, and
Surgery.
5.0 Non-defective Characterizations
It would be good to have something a bit clearer and general to say
about what elicitation conditions have to be like in order for
assessments to be reasonably treated as Strong Data, so that we could
test whether those conditions have been met for arbitrary cases.
Fortunately, the Basic Triangulation Strategy itself suggests a place to
start. To have an easy way to refer back to it, I’ll call the account
below “Non-defective Characterizations”. The overall idea is that
points of evaluation (contexts and indices) need to be characterized in
a way that speakers can be reasonably expected to be reliable in their
31
grasp of what’s said and in their assessment of whether what’s said is
true. This means both that,
1. Characterizations of discourse contexts must at least include any information that makes a difference to what’s said, by the light of any hypothesis at-issue (e.g. a Common Ground, discourse referents, Question Under Discussion or discourse goals, domain goals), etc. (This constraint is to ensure that Recognition of Meaning is reasonable.)
2. Minimally, circumstances of evaluation must be characterized in terms that permit competent speakers to recognize the truth-value of an utterance, given its content (making Recognition of Circumstances reasonable).
6.0 MacFarlane’s Challenge Revisited6.1 The MacFarlane Judgments Are Not Strong Data
We’re now in a position to assess the fourth central claim listed at the
outset, which can now be stated as the claim that MacFarlane’s judgments
in his central motivating case against contextualism for deontic modals are
not Strong Data as his challenge to contextualism require. To see this,
begin by assuming for the sake of argument that these judgments are
widespread and firm. (We’ll come back to assessing the plausibility of this
assumption in section 6.2, below.) In order for these judgments to be
Strong Data and not merely Data, both we and our eavesdropper, Lila, must
be in a position to accurately assess what Ian has said with BLAZER. Is it
reasonable to suppose we are? Our grounds for according any assessment
the status of Strong Data are given by the Basic Triangulation Strategy.
This strategy, recall, presupposes that speakers are in a position (i) to
identify those aspects of meaning that contribute to the determination of
truth and (ii) recognize when circumstances suffice to settle truth-value.
32
Our test for whether those assumptions are reasonable in a given case is
given by the account, Non-defective Characterizations, which requires that
the characterization of the discourse context and the circumstances of
evaluation include any information assessors need in order to accurately
triangulate on a truth-value.
According to the Flexible Contextualist, in order to determine a
proposition expressed and a truth-value, the characterization of a point of
evaluation (here treated simply as a context, world pair), will need to
determine values for f, g, f(w), and g(w). So, to satisfy Neutrality, our
characterization of Blue Blazer will need to include enough information for
speakers to work out these values. On the face of it, the value for g might
seem pretty obvious. Isn’t it reasonable to assume that the only standard
in play is given by Ian’s (presumed) goal of making money? The betting
context certainly makes that a salient value. But, in fact, the case as
characterized is compatible with supplying two different types of value for
g, one information-insensitive and one information-sensitive. (The former
type parameter value gives rise to so-called “objective” readings, the latter,
“subjective”.24) An information-insensitive value for g would rank a world w’
in the modal background in terms of its comparative value, given the
circumstances in w’, while an information-sensitive g-parameter value
24 For details on how this contrast is drawn in the present framework, see Dowell (2013).
33
would rank such a world in terms of the expected value of w’, given facts
about some body of information in w’.25
It’s easy to see that Blue Blazer’s original bare-bones sketch is
compatible with both types of value for g by seeing how different, small
elaborations of that sketch can bring out each. Consider first an
information-insensitive reading.
Objective
Suppose before Ian utters BLAZER, Lila hears him say,
(WIN) Let’s see; Blue Blazer has always won in the past. So, Blue Blazer will win.
Here it’s natural to hear BLAZER as expressing an objective ‘ought’,
that, given the circumstances, Ian ought to bet on Blue Blazer. If that’s
so, and Lila knows that Ian is mistaken about what the circumstances
are, she’s in a position to deny the very proposition the contextualist
holds Ian has expressed. So long as his belief about what the
circumstances are is reasonable, his assertion of BLAZER is warranted,
Lila’s assertion of EXPLODER is warranted, and their assertions express
disagreement with one another. Moreover, this reading is easily
represented in the Flexible Contextualist framework. The availability of
this way of filling out MacFarlane’s sketch means that one possible
explanation for our judgment that BLAZER and EXPLODER are both
25 This oversimplifies slightly how ordering sources may take information-sensitive readings, but not in a way that matters for current purposes. For a discussion of further forms of information-sensitivity, see Bronfman and Dowell (2016).
34
warranted and that EXPLODER expresses disagreement with BLAZER is
that we’re responding to just such a way of filling out the case.
On MacFarlane’s relativist view, the truth of all deontic modal
sentences is determined in part by an information parameter in the
index. For this reason, it’s perhaps more charitable to suppose that
MacFarlane intended to sketch a case that didn’t allow for an
information-insensitive reading. So, imagine instead that we fill out the
case in a way that brings out an information-sensitive reading. One
way this can be done is by adding information about the source of a
speaker’s evidence for their assertion. Here’s an illustration:
Subjective
Suppose Ian is himself eavesdropping on a group of horse
trainers speculating about the race. After sharing what they know
about each of the horses in the race, they agree that Blue Blazer is
most likely to win. This leads Ian to reason aloud,
(LOCAL EXPERTS) Well, the local experts agree that Blue Blazer is most likely to win. So, [BLAZER].
Unbeknownst to Ian, though, Lila, herself a horse trainer, is
eavesdropping on his soliloquy from behind a bush. In response, she
utters,
(EXPLODER) No, you ought to bet on Exploder.
Here it’s natural to hear BLAZER as expressing a ‘subjective’ “ought”,
that, given facts about what’s known by the local experts, it’s
35
expected-best to bet on Blue Blazer. Unbeknownst to Ian, though,
there is an additional expert, Lila, who has information the other
experts do not, namely, that Blue Blazer is suffering from the ill effects
of a drug. Given all expert information, it’s expected-best to bet on
Exploder. So, what Ian has said is false and Lila is right to reject the
very proposition Ian asserted. (Note that this case is like Surgery and
Unknown Student.) Here, too, respondents appear to have the
assessments MacFarlane reports. But this natural reading is also easily
captured in the Kratzerian framework.
That these two ways of filling out Blue Blazer give rise to
distinct propositions shows that Recognition of Meaning is not
reasonably assumed in MacFarlane’s originally sketched case. It may
be, as a matter of coincidence, that the distinct propositions are alike
in truth value in each of their respective scenarios. But this fortuitous
fact does not mean that speakers are in a position to triangulate in the
original, underdescribed case. And that means that the MacFarlane
judgments about the original case are not Strong Data.
This fact is underscored by noting that not all ways of filling out
the original bare-bones sketch preserve MacFarlane’s judgments.
Suppose Ian asserts LOCAL EXPERTS after eavesdropping on a group
that he knows contains some, but not all of the local experts. (He
notices that Lila is missing.) Here his assertion of BLAZER seems less
reasonable than in Subjective. Or suppose instead that only Lila
36
knows about Blue Blazer’s incapacitation and will not give Ian this
information before he needs to place his bet (i.e. that Lila’s information
is otherwise inaccessible to Ian). On MacFarlane’s view, on which it is
the assessor’s information that determines the truth-value of deontic
modal claims, rather than the original speaker’s, the in principle
inaccessibility of the assessor’s information to the speaker should
make no difference to the truth of the former’s assessments (at least
not in cases in which our information, as assessors of those
assessments, does not differ from that of the assessor herself). In my
(2013), I conjectured on the basis of some initial evidence that the
accessibility of an extracontextual assessor’s information to the
original speaker made a difference to respondents’ judgments about
the former’s assessment, in cases involving the use of a deontic modal
which, unlike MacFarlane’s own, takes a forced, information-sensitive
reading. This conjecture has now been experimentally verified.
6.2 Experimental Data
Participants were asked to consider a scenario involving a
deliberating doctor whose medical information is incomplete. In all
relevant respects, it is the precise case which served as the basis for
my (2013) discussion.26 The study confirming the conjecture there
tested the difference two factors make to participant answers: The
accessibility of an extracontextual assessor’s information to the
26 The case is largely inspired by Jackson (1991). 37
original speaker and whether the assessor assessed the speaker’s
utterance as true or false. In all four cases, the assessor is an
eavesdropper and so not in the context of utterance. Unlike
MacFarlane’s Blue Blazer example, the experiment involved the
assessment of a forced, information-sensitive deontic modal.
6.2.1 Methods
Two hundred participants were recruited using Amazon
Mechanical Turk (AMT). Each participant was randomly assigned to a
case in which the eavesdropper’s information was accessible or
inaccessible and in which the eavesdropper assessed the original
utterance as true or false, for a total of four possible conditions. No
participant was permitted to answer more than one questionnaire.
Each questionnaire contained two questions, one question was a study
question, the second a “dummy” question, designed to test a
speaker’s ability to accurately answer questions about truth-value
assessments. Participants who gave incorrect answers to the dummy
question were excluded from the results. The four cases were:
Accessible/FalseDr. Pavese is deciding which of three drugs, Drug A, Drug B, or Drug C, to prescribe her patient. Her brief investigation into the effects of each suggests that one of Drug A or Drug B will cure the patient, while the other is very likely to be lethal. Her evidence, though, does not indicate which drug is which. Drug C, in contrast, won’t cure the patient, but is guaranteed to relieve his major symptoms without any negative side effects.
In light of this, Dr. Pavese concludes, “I should prescribe Drug C” and gives her patient the drug.
38
A simple and standard test Pavese could have, but didn’t run, however, would have shown that A is very likely the curative drug and that neither Drug A nor Drug B is, in fact, lethal. Dr. Bernstein, who knows this, is a senior physician monitoring Pavese’s patient care via closed circuit TV in another hospital in a distant city.
In light of this, Bernstein turns to a colleague and says,
“Dr. Pavese shouldn’t prescribe Drug C. She should prescribe Drug A.”
“So”, Bernstein concludes, “what Dr. Pavese said is false”.
Participants were then asked to express the extent of their agreement or
disagreement with Dr. Bernstein’s conclusion on the scale of 1 to 7.
Accessible/True
For this question, the case description is the same as for
Accessible/False up until Dr. Bernstein’s remark to her colleague. In this
case, she instead says,
“It’s too bad Pavese didn’t run the standard test, since it shows that prescribing Drug A is very likely better than prescribing Drug C. Since she didn’t run it, though, she’s doing the right thing.”
“So”, Bernstein concludes, “what Dr. Pavese said is true”.
Participants were then also asked to express the extent of their agreement
or disagreement with Dr. Bernstein’s conclusion on the scale of 1 to 7.
Inaccessible/False
Dr. Pavese is deciding which of three drugs, Drug A, Drug B, or Drug C to prescribe her patient. Her extremely careful and thorough investigation into the effects of each suggests that one of Drug A or Drug B will cure the patient, while the other is very likely to be lethal. Her evidence, though, does not indicate which drug is which. Drug C, in contrast, won’t cure the patient, but is guaranteed to relieve his major symptoms without any negative side effects.
39
In light of this, Dr. Pavese concludes, “I should prescribe Drug C” and gives her patient the drug.
Dr. Bernstein is a senior physician monitoring Pavese’s patient care via closed circuit TV in another hospital in a distant city. Unlike Pavese, Bernstein has just learned of very recent, top secret research into the effects of Drug A and Drug B. This secret research shows that that Drug A is very likely the curative drug and that neither Drug A nor Drug B is lethal. Unfortunately, Pavese has no way of learning of these new results before administering the drug.
In light of this, Bernstein turns to a colleague and says,
“Dr. Pavese shouldn’t prescribe Drug C. She should prescribe Drug A.”
“So”, Bernstein concludes, “what Dr. Pavese said is false”.
Participants were here too asked to express the extent of their agreement
or disagreement with Dr. Bernstein’s conclusion on the scale of 1 to 7.
Inaccessible/True
The background story for this case is the same as that for
Inaccessible/False, until Dr. Bernstein speaks to her colleague. In this case,
though, she says,
“It’s too bad there’s no way for Pavese to know about this secret research, since it shows that prescribing Drug A is very likely better than prescribing Drug C. Since there isn’t, though, she’s doing the right thing.”
“So”, Bernstein concludes, “what Dr. Pavese said is true”.
Participants here were also asked to express the extent of their agreement
or disagreement with Dr. Bernstein’s conclusion along the same scale.
5.2.2 Results
The study’s results were striking. (See Figure 1.)
40
Accessible Inaccessible1
2
3
4
5
6
7
"true""false"
Figure 1 Mean agreement by condition. Error bars show
standard error of the mean.
The data were analyzed using a 2 (accessibility) x 2 (truth-value)
ANOVA. There was no main effect of accessibility, F (1, 130) = .57, p
= .45, or of truth-value F (1, 130) = .31, p = .58. However, there was
a significant interaction, F (1, 130) = 4.2, p = .042.
To further explore this interaction pattern, the accessible and
inaccessible conditions were examined separately. For the accessible
condition, there was a significant effect that participants agreed more
that it was false (M = 4.68, SD = 1.98) than that it was true (M =3.81,
SD=1.57), t (76) = 2.14, p =.036. For the inaccessible condition, there
was no significant difference between participants’ agreement with
false (M = 4.25, SD = 2.20) than with true (M =4.75, SD=1.75), t (54)
= .92, p =.35.
6.2.3 Discussion
A few features of these results especially stand out.
41
(i) Although MacFarlane’s view predicts a clear inclination to
completely agree (or at least to agree) with an assessor’s
false-assessment both when the extracontextual assessor’s
information is accessible and when it is inaccessible to the
original speaker, that is not what we find.
(ii) Although MacFarlane’s view predicts a clear inclination to
completely disagree (or at least to disagree) with an
assessor’s true-assessment in both the accessible and
inaccessible cases, that, too, is not what we find.
(iii) In Dowell (2013) paper, I predicted split reactions in
eavesdropper cases, with some tendency to agree with the
“false” assessment in the accessible case using as reader
prompts scenarios very much like the ones used in this
study. (Dowell 2013: 169-171.) This is what we find.
(iv) There I also show how a suitably flexible Kratzerian
contextualism, together with a bit of completely standard
pragmatic reasoning, could explain a pattern much like the
one we do find in terms of a failure of PUBLICITY. (Dowell
2013: 167-71.)27
27 Knobe and Yalcin (2014) similarly show that speaker’s reactions are split in extracontextual assessment cases involving epistemic modals. Yalcin (2011) suggests that this pattern is not well-explained by a contextualist theory and provides some evidence for an expressivist one (together with a semantics that requires more enriched indices than Kratzer’s). But Dowell (2011) anticipates the split reactions Knobe and Yalcin find and offers a contextualist-friendly explanation of that split, relying on the same pattern of pragmatic reasoning offered
42
7.0 Preliminary Conclusions: Round II
Putting the considerations raised in the last section together,
we’re able to draw our second round of conclusions.
1. As we’ve seen, MacFarlane’s discussion of his central example
does not describe a scenario so much as sketch one. And adding
just enough detail to that sketch to elicit speaker reactions does
not leave us with a case described in sufficient detail for it to be
clear what, exactly, our speaker aims to communicate. There
are at least two different and incompatible ways of realistically
adding to the bare-bones description in Blue Blazer, Objective
and Subjective, that elicit the MacFarlane judgments. (By
“realistic” here, I just mean that the additions make the scenario
more like a real world case of language use.) Judgments in
Objective and Subjective, though, are easily explained by
Flexible Contextualism and so present no challenge to Kratzerian
contextualism as such.
2. Moreover, that each of Objective and Subjective are
compatible with MacFarlane’s original bare-bones case suggests
a contextualist-friendly explanation for why speakers might find
themselves sharing MacFarlane’s judgments: They are imagining
the case filled out in something like one of these two ways. (More
here and in Dowell (2013). For a Flexbile Contextualist explanation of their data, see Dowell (forthcoming).
43
on this suggestion in 8.0, below.)
3. Other realistic ways of filling out the case, though, fail to elicit
MacFarlane’s judgments.
4. Both the variation of proposition expressed and of assessments
of BLAZER and EXPLODER across different ways of filling out
Blue Blazer shows that it does not include sufficient information
to put respondents in a position to identify those aspects of
meaning that contribute to the determination of truth by the
lights of one of the hypotheses (Flexible Contextualism) at-issue.
5. This means that Recognition of Meaning is not a reasonable
assumption to make about Blue Blazer and so it is not
reasonable to treat our judgments about that case, even when
they conform to MacFarlane’s own, as Strong Data.
6. Assuming nonetheless that those judgments are Strong Data is a
violation of the Neutrality Constraint and so question-begging.
Acceptance of these conclusions, though, as well as the
observations and constraints that serve as their basis, leaves all
parties to the dispute with some explaining to do. If it is the case that
many readers of MacFarlane’s challenge find themselves sharing his
judgments about the original, underdescribed case, we have a uniform
pattern of judgment that needs to be explained—in other words, that
pattern of judgments is Data. #2, above, suggests a way of doing
that, but it would be good to see that suggestion filled out in enough
44
detail to make it plausible, rather than merely suggestive. Moreover,
the pattern observed in the experimental data presented in 6.2 need
explaining. Why, for example, are participants more inclined to agree
with an extracontextual assessor’s false-assessment when that
assessor’s information is available to the speaker of the assessed
utterance than when it’s not? And why do we find split and weak
inclinations to agree and disagree, rather than judgments that are
more uniform and firm?
8.0 Explaining Our Response Patterns
Ordinary speaker reactions to MacFarlane’s original bare-bones
case remain empirically untested. It is notable, though, that many
philosophers working on modals have found themselves sharing his
judgments. What would explain this? A simple hypothesis would be
MacFarlane’s powers of persuasion. Perhaps, as some have suggested
about Putnam’s famous Twin Earth thought experiments, it is not so
much that ordinary thinkers find independently that they share
MacFarlane’s judgments so much as that they are persuaded by his
reasoning in favor of those judgments, which he intersperses with the
description of the case.28
28 For example, MacFarlane does not invite you to consider for yourself whether or not it is plausible that the eavesdropper’s information is relevant for determining what the original speaker has said in Blue Blazer. Rather, his characterization suggests that this would not be plausible. (“He had no grounds for saying anything that strong.”) For a discussion of a case in which it is plausible, though, involving the use of an epistemic modal, see Dowell (2011).
45
Setting that explanation aside, though, it is easy enough to see
what might be going on, on the assumption that something like
Flexible Contextualism is true, together with a bit of completely
familiar pragmatic reasoning.
8.1 Explaining the MacFarlane Judgments
Here are some independently plausible, explanatory hypotheses:
1. We expect interlocutors to be rational and cooperative.29 So we
incline towards charity, i.e. towards available interpretations that
are at least reasonable and, ideally, both reasonable and true.
2. So, in defective contexts, when it is not clear what a speaker has
said, we decide between available interpretations, when we can,
by maximizing reasonableness, assuming cooperation.
3. Similarly, we assume, where we can, circumstances of evaluation
that maximize truth.
4. So, when we have the judgments that MacFarlane reports in the
original, underdescribed case, we are ruling out possible contexts of
utterance and circumstances of evaluation that make those
utterances less reasonable.
5. In other words, rather than triangulating on a truth-value at a clearly
determined point of evaluation, we are ruling out that Ian and Lila
are each in a context of utterance that would make what they say
unreasonable. Objective and Subjective each specify such a
29 This thesis has been defended most famously in Grice (1989). 46
context. So we presuppose some such point of evaluation, ruling out
less charitable rivals.
8.2 Explaining the Experimental Data
What about the experimental data? Two features of our data need
explaining: First, the inclination to agree with an extracontextual
assessor’s “false”-assessment when that assessor’s information is
available to the original speaker, in contrast to the absence of such an
inclination when it is not. Second, the weakness of these inclinations. We
already have most of the resources on the table to explain both.
Consider the second feature first. In earlier papers on epistemic and
information-sensitive deontic modals, I noted that competent speaker
assessments of eavesdroppers are neither as strong nor as uniform as
relativists predict.30 Rather, their judgments are more indecisive. This
observation was empirically confirmed for the epistemic modals case in
Knobe and Yalcin (2014) and here for the case of information-sensitive
deontic modals. The indecision in both cases may be traced to a failure of
Publicity, the requirement on contexts that they be able to manifest a
speaker’s domain-restricting intention to a reasonable audience. In my
2013 paper on deontic modals I argued,
…the puzzling features of eavesdropper cases [in both the epistemic and deontic cases] may be traced to failures of Publicity. Intuitions about the appropriateness of such third-party assessments are actually neither as strong nor as uniform as relativists need, a fact that any plausible theory needs to explain.
30 See, for example, Egan (2007), Egan, Hawthorne, and Weatherson (2005), and MacFarlane (2011) and (2014).
47
Publicity failure explains the split intuitions because, in eavesdropper cases, it is not clear which of two different domain-restricting intentions the original speaker has, and so it is also unclear what she has said. (Does Original Speaker intend to speak to what is compatible with the information had only by participants in her conversation? Or does she intend to include the information of anyone engaged in the same token inquiry her [modal] assertion is intended to settle? If so, then Eavesdropper’s information is in and Speaker’s substantive view about who is engaged in her inquiry is false.) Since it is unclear what Speaker has said, it is unclear what Eavesdropper has said. Which of these two possible propositions is Eavesdropper rejecting? The intuitions of assessors of [Eavesdropper] cases are split because they are assessing different possible propositions.31
Or, we might add, they are unsure which proposition is the one they are
being asked to assess.
We may expand on this explanation using the ideas introduced in
section 3.2.2. There I suggested that we may model our story about how
contexts can satisfy or fail to satisfy Publicity using Stalnaker’s widely
accepted method for representing contexts in terms of a Common Ground. It
is now straightforward to say what is defective about all extracontextual
assessor cases: Extracontextual assessors are, by definition, assessors who
are not in conversational contact with the speaker whose utterance they
assess. So, there is no conversation structured by shared purposes and no
set of propositions mutually (and known to be mutually) presupposed. In
other words, all such cases lack a Common Ground between speaker and
assessor. This means an important resource for manifesting speakers’
intentions is missing. Unless the overheard conversation or monologue itself
31 For a discussion of how Publicity failures explain our split intuitions in eavesdropper cases involving epistemic modals, see Dowell (2011).
48
contains information that suffices to manifest a speaker’s intention (as the
continuations of Blue Blazer, Objective and Subjective do) Publicity will
not be met.
This is so in our experimental scenarios. In the two different
characterizations of the background to Dr. Pavese’s utterance, it is unclear
which of proposition she aims to express. The deontic modal is clearly
information-sensitive, but the context as it is characterized makes salient
four at least notionally distinct bodies of information, namely, the
information Pavese has when she says what she does, the information
practically available to her before she writes her prescription, and either of
those bodies together with the information had by Dr. Bernstein, our
extracontextual assessor. As we’ll soon see, those four notionally distinct
bodies of information are not equally salient. Nonetheless, since that
characterization does not uniquely select one, it is unclear what Pavese has
said in a way that makes a difference to whether what she’s said is true.
(What she’s said is true if Bernstein’s information is excluded, false if it isn’t.)
So, judgments are indecisive.
What remains to be explained is why, when the eavesdropper’s
information is accessible to the deliberating doctor, participants displayed
some tendency to somewhat agree with the eavesdropper’s “false”-
assessment that they did not display when that information is inaccessible.
As mentioned above, Dowell (2013) predicts and explains these judgments
49
with respect to the case tested. So, we can begin with some of these old
observations about the case, there (and here) called “Doctor”.
….note some important features of [Pavese’s] context: [Pavese] is in a context of deliberation and she is deliberating under conditions of uncertainty. By ‘condition of uncertainty’ I mean…that there is some time after which she can expect the value of the outcome of whichever drug she prescribes to diminish and she has no reason to expect that all uncertainty will be removed prior to that time. So, she must arrive at a practical conclusion prior to a time at which all relevant information can be expected to be in. Let [t be]…the latest time at which [Pavese] can most effectively prescribe a drug. One feature of [her] context is that there will be some body of information available to her prior to [t] that would allow her to expect to most improve [her patient’s] health.”
The best information available to a deliberating agent by the time that
action is necessary is a body of information that deliberating contexts
make salient. Not all deliberating contexts make that information most
or uniquely salient. We know that when the stakes are low and agents
regard further information as likely to make no interesting difference to
the expected value of options, they are unlikely to care much about
gathering the best information available to them. Such deliberative
contexts won’t make the best information available to an agent before
she needs to act most salient. But in a medical context in which a
doctor is deliberating about serious medical outcomes for her patient,
as in the present case, (life versus death, a cure versus the mitigation
of symptoms), we take it to be part of a doctor’s duty to gather the
best information practically available to her prior to arriving at her
decision. This is so for our tested scenarios.
50
Call the tested scenarios labeled “accessible/true” and
“accessible/false” above, “Doctor-accessible”. In these scenarios,
there is a “simple and standard test Pavese could have, but didn’t run”
which would have given her Bernstein’s information prior to the time at
which she needed to prescribe a drug to her patient. Since it is
reasonable to assume that doctors aim to base their medical decisions
on the best information practically available to them prior to the time
at which medical intervention is necessary, it is reasonable to assume
that when Pavese concludes “I should prescribe Drug C”, she intends
her utterance to be relative to such a body of information. But since
the results of the “simple and standard” test are practically available
to her, that information includes the information of Bernstein, her
eavesdropper. Relative to that information, prescribing C isn’t best,
prescribing A is. So, relative to that information, what Pavese said is
false. These features of deliberative, medical contexts bring out this
reading, explaining some tendency to agree with the eavesdropper’s
“false”-assessment.
In Doctor-accessible, Bernstein’s information is practically
available to Pavese. This means that Pavese’s actual information plus
Bernstein’s information is the same body of information as the
information practically available Pavese prior to administering a drug.
In contrast, in the remaining cases, Doctor-inaccessible, the
eavesdropper’s superior information isn’t practically available the
51
deliberating doctor. This makes two distinct bodies of information
salient in the scenario, the information practically available to Pavese
before she needs to administer a drug and that information together
with Bernstein’s information about the results of the top-secret medical
experiment. In Bronfman and Dowell (2016), we called the readings
that result from such bodies of information “advisability readings”.
Roughly, an advisability reading is one that results from taking a body
of information and adding to it one or more facts.32 If we take the
information practically available to Pavese and add to it the facts about
Drug A that Bernstein knows, we’ll get a body of information that,
were what Pavese said relative to it, would make what she said false.
This means that there is a reading, suggested by the description of the
scenario Doctor-inaccessible, on which what Pavese said is false.
But it is not the only reading suggested by that scenario. The
reading on which only the information practically available to Pavese
before she needs to administer a drug is relevant for what she’s said is
also suggested by the scenario. On that reading, what Pavese has said
is true. Unlike in Doctor-accessible, in which these two bodies of
information are the same and so generate readings that are alike in
truth-value, in Doctor-inaccessible, they are distinct in a way that
generates readings that differ in truth-value. So in the latter case,
participant judgments are weaker and more undecided.
32 Page numbers from published version.52
8.Overall Summary and Conclusions
We’ve seen,
1. In order to be Strong Data, competent speaker assessments
must be reasonably thought reliable.
2. That requires giving respondents non-defective characterizations
of cases. Minimally, this means that respondents must be given
sufficient information both to work out from context which
proposition is expressed (making Recognition of Meaning
reasonable) and to work out from the circumstances of
evaluation whether that proposition is true (making Recognition
of Circumstances reasonable).
3. The case, Blue Blazer, serving as the basis for MacFarlane’s
central challenge to contextualism about deontic modals is
defectively described. So our judgments about that case are not
Strong Data.
4. Repairing that characterization in ways that seem to preserve his
judgments, Objective and Subjective, leaves us with no data
the Flexible Contextualist cannot explain.
5. Repairing the case in ways that seem to be intended by his
discussion, with a forced, information-sensitive deontic modal,
has been empirically shown not to preserve the judgments
MacFarlane predicts. So, those judgments can serve as no basis
53
for a relativist replacement for the canonical, contextualist
semantics.
6. Moreover, the data that we do find is easily given a contextualist-
friendly explanation, as shown in Dowell (2013) and above.
7. So, MacFarlane-style eavesdropper cases, rather than providing
evidence for his relativist semantics, if anything, provides some
evidence for Flexible Contextualism over relativism.
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