FACTIVITY AND TRUTH CONDITION

1. FACTIVITY AND TRUTH CONDITION Hu Lanshuang

2. J T B ? Meno Theatetus not always need to believe ALLAN HAZLETT not enough not a good way is merely true believe

3. 1. W 2. TRUTH HY? 3. 4. <The Mythe of Factive Verbs> 2010<Factive Presupposition and theTruth Condition on Knowledge> 2012

4. So, what did he do ? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

5. 1. what is factivity? (Factivity) Certain two-place predicates, including ‘knows’, ‘learns’, ‘remembers’, and ‘realizes’, which denote relations between persons and propositions, are factive in this sense: an utterance of ‘S knows p’ is true only if p, an utterance of ‘S learned p’ is true only if p, and so on.

6. 1.  Everyone knew that stress caused ulcers, before two Australian doctors in the early 80s proved that ulcers are actually caused by bacterial infection. He figures anything big enough to sink the ship they’re going to see in time to turn. But the ship’s too big, with too small a rudder … it can’t corner worth shit. Everything he knows is wrong.

7. 1.  In school we learned that World War I was a war to “make the world safe for democracy,” when it was really a war to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.  I had trouble breathing, sharp pains in my side, several broken ribs and a partially collapsed lung, and I was in the middle of nowhere without any real rescue assets—it was then that I realized I was going to die out there.

8. Objection:The uses of factive verbs you appeal to are cases of loose talk. Reply 1:On some views of loose talk, ‘loose’ utterances are literally true, but not ‘strictly’ true, not as accurate as they could be, etc. For example, Peter van Inwagen argues that an ordinary utterance of ‘There are two very valuable chairs in the next room’ could be true (though it is ‘loose talk’), even though ‘strictly speaking’ there are no chairs.If this is the right model of ‘loose talk’, then the objection fails to eliminate the prima facie threat to Factivity. Reply 2: A paradigm case of loose talk is an utterance of ‘It’s two-thirty’ when it is, exactly, 2:29. The ‘loose’ utterance is ‘close’ to be being true, it ‘approximates’ the truth, etc. The uses of ‘knows’, ‘learns’, ‘remembers’, and ‘realizes’ in the examples above are nothing like that.

9. Objection:People’s resistance to the truth condition on knowledge is the result of the popularity of relativism Reply:Suppose it’s right, as we learn from anthropologists and sociologists, that just as there is Western scientific knowledge, there is also tribalknowledge, ancient Greek knowledge (perhaps this includes the knowledge that the earth is flat), and so on; suppose we agree that there are a plenum of incompatible ‘epistemologies’, each equally legitimate, each just as much a body of knowledge as the others.If nothing false can be known, it follows from this that there area plurality of incompatible truths—and this is an unlovely relativism that violates the law of non-contradiction. If, on the other hand, falsehoods can be known, then relativism about knowledgegives us no motivation to slip towards relativism about truth.

10. So, what did he do ? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

11. non-factive theory which maintains that while an utterance of ‘S knows p’ might be true even though p is false, the following (at least) are necessary conditions on the truth of knowledge attributions:

12. non-factive theory sufficient conditions unorthodox,externalistconcept of warrant.

13. non-factive theory given this concept of knowledge, the truth of S’s belief that p is sufficient, but not necessary, for that belief to count as knowledge. the theory proposed is neutral on the question of whether the conditions described in NF1 and NF2 are jointly sufficient for the truth of ‘S knows p’, or on whether there are additional necessary conditions on the truth of ‘S knows p’ (with the exception of the condition that p is true). The theory is also neutral when it comes to the question of whether the concept of knowledge is ‘composite’ (definable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions) or whether it is primitive (as in Williamson’s epistemology)

15. So, what did he do ? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

16. ordinary uses of “know”

17. ordinary uses of “know” A theory of knowledge attributions should give a semantics for ‘knows’ that explains how this is possible.

18. before that..

19. non-factive theory B implies that the known proposition is true

20. non-factive theory I B here implies that she believes that the bomb was homemade, and that she wishes her interlocutor to believe this as well. Given that she doesn’t add that caveat, she implies that the FBI’s belief is true one who utters ‘S knows p’ impliesthat p is true, but ‘S knows p’ does not entailthat p is true.

21. non-factive theory II Given that B didn’t use ‘thought’, and didn’t add a caveat to her knowledge attribution, our listener can assume that B accepts that the defendant committed a crime. it is presupposed that the defendant committed a crime ‘Professor O’Brien resisted the temptation to pontificate today’, I contend, the speaker who utters ‘S knows p’ in cases of type II presupposes that p is true, but ‘S knows p’ does not entail that p is true.

22. non-factive theory III first-person knowledge attributions are typically used to make a guarantee or promisethat something is the case, where such promises can be understood by analogy with promises to do something. Austin But, just as an utterance of ‘I fully intend to Φ’ may suffice for a promise to Φ, even though ‘I fully intend to Φ’ does not entail that I will Φ, an utterance of ‘I know p’ may suffice (in cases of type III) for a guarantee that p, even though ‘I know p’ does not entail that p is true. But this is wrong—broken promises are (sadly) a part of life. More to the point, even if I fail to promise (in some strict sense) when I utter ‘I fully intend to Φ’, if it turns out that I fail to Φ, my utterance may still have perfectly true (i.e. I really did fully intend to Φ). I say the same about ‘I know p’, mutatis mutandis.)

23. non-factive theory this may account for the intuition that ‘S knows p’ entails that p is true. not necessary,just implie,presuppose or guarantee the truth.

24. non-factive theory V VI the speaker is either speaking falsely when she admits knowledge, or when she denies believing. For imagine that the sensor malfunctionso pening the door when no one is there. There are cases of ‘knowledge without belief’ that I think are uncontroversial cases of ironyorpretense. we just humoring our interlocutor I am inclined to say that the speaker engages in metaphor

25. traditional theory × IV ‘He gave her a ring studded with diamonds, but they turned out to be glass’ ‘She knew that he would never let her down, but, like all the others, he did’

26. there are three relevant differences between this case, and the cases of (1) and (2) traditional theory the speaker who says ‘He gave her a ring studded with diamonds, but they turned out to be glass’ will respond negatively to the question of whether the ring was really studded with diamonds. It’s not clear how the ordinary person who utters (1) or (2) would respond to such a question (e.g. of whether people really knew stress caused ulcers). must be deliberate;‘He gave her a ring studded with diamonds’ is false;But it is not plausible—at least not as clearly plausible as in the case of the ‘glass diamonds’— that ‘Everyone knew that stress caused ulcers’ is false. Diamonds are a natural kin,so we have independent scientific reason to believe that no diamonds are made of glass.Knowledge (I submit) is not a natural kind;The boundaries of the concept of diamonds are, in some significant sense, not ours to draw—nature draws them for us. But the boundaries of the concept of knowledge are not like this.

27. so,

28. So, what did he do ? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

29. how to deal with the factivity? Linguists typically take the phenomenon of factivity to be a matter of presupposition which down to the conversational implicature.

30. what is different from entialment? presuppositions are triggered as a matter of the conventional meaning of specific lexical items, like words or sentencesSuch an account of factive presupposition, applied to “knows,” would say that “knows” or <S knows p> triggers the presupposition that p is true. 1.Just as <S knows p> presupposes p, <S doesn’t know p> and <Does S know p?> presuppose p. That, at least, seems sometimes to be the case:

31. what is different from entialment? 2.Suppose we said that <X> entails q only if, necessarily, if q is false then <X> is false. We might after all hope to be able to reject <X> as false if we discover that one of its entailments is false.It seems that <S doesn’t know p> can be true even if p is false NOT PRESUPPOSIT,TOO

32. Consider Robert Stalnaker’s (1999) account of presupposition, on which “it is persons rather than sentences, propositions or speech acts that have or make presuppositions.” It is clear that in most cases when anyone asserts or denies that S knows that P, he presupposes that P. The appeal of pragmatic accounts comes from the fact that the behavior of paradigm factives(“knows,” “realizes,” “proves,” “discovers,” “learns,” “shows”) varies substantially with context.Someone’s utterance of the same sentence can involve a factive presupposition in one context but not in another.

33. SOME EXAMPLES

34. CONCLUTION ABOVE 1.truth condition is not necessary for knowledge. 2.Factivity is just a kind of presupposition. 3.There are factive use and non-factive use of factive verbs,which down to conversational implicature.

35. So, what did he do ? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

36. conversational implicature can be cancellable,but <S know p>can't. Here’s my take on all this: there are factive and non-factive uses of “knows.” Most of the time – an utterance of <S knows p> implicates p,the speaker in such cases pragmatically presupposes p. When an utterance of <S knows p> does implicate p, there is no reason to expect that said utterance could be replaced, in the same context, with an utterance of <S knows p, but not-p>; that was the point from Weiner . There is no reason to think that implicatures are cancelable in that sense. They must be cancelable in a weaker sense,however: if I say that utterances of <S knows p> typically implicate p, then it must be possible to find cases in which <S knows p> is acceptable and doesn’t imply p, or it must be possible to find cases in which <S knows p, but not-p> is acceptable. But we can find such cases. This is defeasible, prima facie evidence that <S knows p> doesn’t entail p.

37. “THINK THEY KNOW” IS DIFFERENT FROM “THEY REALLY KNOW” Propositional attitude attributions can be used to do either of two rather different things. On the one hand, they can be used to describe someone’s state of mind. On the other, they can be used to imply information about the world. Consider the claim that the Ancients knew that the earth was flat. It seems to me that we might ask whether the Ancients really knew that the earth was flat with two different contrasts in mind, which might be made explicit. We might ask whether the Ancients really knew that the earth was flat, as opposed to the earth being round. And here the obviously correct answer is that the earth is round, and that they did not really know. But we also might ask whether the Ancients really knew that the earth was flat, as opposed to this not being an item of common knowledge in Ancient times, or as opposed to this being more of a hypothesis than a settled conviction, and here the answer isn’t obvious, because it’s a question about the socio-anthropology of the relevant cultures, and not a question about whether the earth is round.

38. Reference 1.Hazlett, A., 2010. The Myth of Factive Verbs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 80(3): 497–522. 2.Hazlett, A,2012. Factive Presupposition and the Truth Condition on Knowledge, Acta Analytica, 27(4):461-478. 3.Crispin Sartwell,1991.Knowledge is Merely True Belief,American Philosophical Quarterly 28(2):157-165 4.Crispin Sartwell,1992,why knowledge is merely true belief,The Journal of Philosophy,89(4):167-180 5.Williamson, T. Knowledge and Its Limits, Introduction and Chapters 1-3, 1-92. 6.Holton, R. (1997). Some telling examples: a reply to Tsohatzidis. Journal of Pragmatics, 28, 625–28.