This is a prepublication draft of a paper that appears in its final and official form in The Philosophical Review, 2002. Assertion, Knowledge, and Context Keith DeRose Yale University This paper brings together two positions that for the most part have been developed and defended independently of one another: contextualism about knowledge attributions and the knowledge account of assertion. The positions under discussion are both located in the area of overlap between epistemology and the philosophy of language and they have both received a good deal of attention in recent years. But there is further reason for surprise that more has not been done to bring them together. The chief bugaboo of contextualism has been the concern that the contextualist is mistaking variability in the conditions of warranted assertability of knowledge attributions for a variability in their truth-conditions. This strongly suggests that a serious assessment of contextualism will demand a discerning look at the question of what it takes for a speaker to make a warranted assertion. And it turns out that the knowledge account of assertion — according to which what one is in a position to assert is what one knows — promises to provide a large and important part of the answer to this question. It also turns out that the knowledge account of assertion dissolves the most pressing problem confronting contextualism, and, on top of that, provides a powerful positive argument in favor of contextualism. Or so I will argue. It will take a bit of work to uncover contextualism’s most pressing problem, since the critics of contextualism have not themselves been very proficient in identifying it. In Part I, then, after briefly explaining contextualism, I will present its main problem — the “Generality Objection”, as I will call it — and will show why this is such a serious concern. In Part II, after the knowledge account of assertion and the grounds that support it have been briefly explained, I will show its need for contextualism and present the positive argument for contextualism that it provides. In Part III, I will use the knowledge account of assertion to squash the Generality Objection and will also cast other shadows over the prospects for anti-contextualism. 1. Contextualism and its Main Problem: From the Warranted Assertability Objection to the Generality Objection 1.1. Contextualists and Their Cases. Contextualists hold that the truth-conditions of knowledge- ascribing and knowledge-denying sentences (sentences of the form “S knows that P” and “S doesn’t know that P” and related variants of such sentences) fluctuate in certain ways according to the context in which they are uttered. What so varies is the epistemic standards that S must meet (or, in the case of a denial of knowledge, fail to meet) for such a statement to be true. In some contexts, “S knows that P” requires that S have a true belief that P and also be in a very strong epistemic position with respect to P, while in other contexts, the same sentence may require for its truth, in addition to S’s having a true belief that P, only that S meet some lower epistemic standards.1 Contextualist accounts of knowledge attributions have been almost invariably developed with an eye toward providing a response to philosophical skepticism. For some skeptical arguments threaten to show that we know nothing (or little) of what we think we know, and thus we are wrong whenever (or almost whenever) we say or think that we know this or that. But according to typical contextualist analysis, the skeptic, in presenting her argument, executes conversational maneuvers by which she raises, or at least threatens to raise,2 the standards for knowledge to a level at which we count as knowing nothing or little, and according to which she can truthfully say that we don’t know. Thus, the contextualist hopes to explain the persuasiveness of the skeptic’s attack, but in a way that makes it unthreatening to the truth of our ordinary claims to know. For the fact that the skeptic can install (or threaten to install) very high standards for knowledge that we do not meet has no tendency to show that we do not meet the more relaxed standards that govern more ordinary conversations. That contextualists have so consistently and so quickly turned their attention toward providing such a response to skepticism would lead one to conclude that the predominant recommendation of contextualism is its ability to provide such a response. However, support for contextualism should also — and perhaps primarily — be looked for in how “knows” and its cognates are utilized in non-philosophical conversation. If our non- 2 philosophical usage of the relevant terms did support contextualism, that would seem to be important evidence in favor of the theory, and contextualist treatments of skepticism could proceed with a lot more leverage behind them. On the other hand, the contextualist’s appeal to varying standards for knowledge in his solution to skepticism would rightly seem unmotivated and ad hoc if we didn’t have independent reason from non-philosophical talk to think such shifts in the content of knowledge attributions occur. But it can seem that there is no real problem for the contextualist here. It’s an obvious enough observation that what we will count as knowledge in some non-philosophical contexts won’t pass as such in others. As J.L. Austin observed, in many ordinary settings we are easy, and say things like (Austin’s example): “I know he is in, because his hat is in the hall.” But, even with no philosophers in sight, at other times speakers get tough and will not claim to know that the owner was present based on the same evidence; as Austin notes: “The presence of the hat, which would serve as proof of the owner’s presence in many circumstances, could only through laxity be adduced as a proof in a court of law.”3 We needn’t invoke anything as unusual as a high-stakes court case to find such variation — as I’m sure Austin realized. A wide variety of different standards for knowledge are actually used in different ordinary contexts. Following Austin’s lead, the contextualist will appeal to pairs of cases that forcefully display this variability: “Low standards” cases in which a speaker seems quite appropriately and truthfully to ascribe knowledge to a subject will be paired with “high standards” cases in which another speaker in a quite different and more demanding context seems with equal propriety and truth to say that the same subject (or a similarly positioned subject) does not know. To make the relevant intuitions as strong as possible, the contextualist will choose a “high standards” case that is not as ethereal as a typical philosophical discussion of radical skepticism: a “skeptical hypothesis” may be employed, but it will be much more moderate than the playthings of philosophers (brains in vats, evil geniuses, or whatnot).4 And it makes the relevant intuitions more stable if the introduction of the more moderate skeptical hypothesis and the resulting raise in epistemic standards are tied to a very practical concern, and thus seem reasonable given the situation. It also helps if this is all accepted as reasonable by all the parties to the conversation. Thus, in the pair of cases I have used – my Bank Cases5 – one character (myself, as it happens), claims to know that the bank is open on Saturday mornings in the “low standards” case. This belief is true, and is based on quite solid grounds: I was at the bank just 3 two weeks ago on a Saturday, and found that it was open until noon on Saturday. Given the practical concerns involved – my wife and I are deciding whether to deposit our paychecks on Friday, or wait until Saturday morning, where no disaster will ensue if we waste a trip to the bank on Saturday only to find it closed – almost any speaker in my situation would claim to know the bank is open on Saturdays. And, supposing “nothing funny” is going on (there has not been a recent rash of banks cutting their Saturday hours in the area, etc.), almost all of us would judge such a claim to know to be true. But in the “high standards” case, disaster, not just disappointment, would ensue if we waited until Saturday only to find we were too late: We have just written a very large and very important check, and will be left in a very bad situation if the check bounces, as it will if we do not deposit our paychecks before Monday. (And, of course, the bank is not open on Sunday.) Given all this, my wife seems reasonable in not being satisfied with my grounds, and, after reminding me of how much is at stake, in raising, as she does, the possibility (the “skeptical hypothesis”) that the bank may have changed it hours in the last couple of weeks. This possibility is fairly far-fetched by ordinary standards, but is downright moderate when compared with the possibilities employed by philosophical skeptics, and seems worth worrying about, given the high stakes we are dealing with. Here I seem quite reasonable in admitting to her that I “don’t know” that the bank is open on Saturdays, and in endeavoring to “make sure.” Almost everyone will accept this as a reasonable admission, and it will seem true to almost everyone.6 1.2. The Warranted Assertability Objection. When in 1986 I first formulated this pair of cases and presented them to my sympathetic but critical teacher, Rogers Albritton, he admitted that they reflect how “knows” is used, but immediately raised the concern that the variability in epistemic standards that my cases display may be only a variability in the conditions under which it is appropriate to claim to know.