Edgington on Possible Knowledge of Unknown Truth

The chapter responds to Dorothy Edgington’s article ‘Possible Knowledge of Unknown Truth’, which defends her seminal diagnosis of the Church–Fitch refutation of verificationist knowability principles. Using counterfactual conditionals, she reformulates those principles to block that objection. The chapter argues that, to avoid trivialization, Edgington must supply a more general constraint on how the knower specifies a counterfactual situation for purposes of her reformulated principles; it is unclear how to do so. The philosophical motivation for her strategy is also questioned, with special reference to her treatment of Putnam’s epistemic account of truth. In passing, it is questioned how dangerous Church–Fitch arguments are for verificationist principles with non-factive evidential attitudes in place of knowledge. Finally, a doubt is raised about the compatibility of Edgington’s reformulation strategy with her view that counterfactual conditionals lack truth-conditions.

Grammar Matters

This chapter explores a number of grammatical properties that conditionals display, with one of its main goals being to show that grammatical form matters: different syntactic expressions of conditionality come with a different range of possible meanings. It also argues that we should not identify the semantic notion ‘conditionals’ with the syntactic expression if p, q. The syntactic construction if p, q is merely one of several syntactic paths that lead to a conditional semantics. The grammatical expression of conditionality determines the range of meanings possible. Overly narrowing conditional semantics to only one syntactic construction makes it harder to identify where each of the elements of meaning originates.

Constructing the Impossible

Please keep the original abstract. A number of philosophers have flirted with the idea of impossible worlds and some have even become enamored of it. But it has not met with the same degree of acceptance as the more familiar idea of a possible world. Whereas possible worlds have played a broad role in specifying the semantics for natural language and for a wide range of formal languages, impossible worlds have had a much more limited role; and there has not even been general agreement as to how a reasonable theory of impossible worlds is to be developed or applied. This chapter provides a natural way of introducing impossible states into the framework of truthmaker semantics and shows how their introduction permits a number of useful applications.

Chasing Hook: Quantified Indicative Conditionals

The chapter looks at indicative conditionals embedded under quantifiers, with a special emphasis on ‘one-case’ conditionals as in No query was answered if it came from a doubtful address. It agrees with earlier assessments that a complete conditional (with antecedent and consequent) is embedded under a quantifier in those constructions, but then proceeds to create a dilemma by showing that we can’t always find the right interpretation for that conditional. Contrary to earlier assessments, Stalnaker’s conditional won’t always do. The chapter concludes that the embedded conditional in the sentence above is a material implication, but the if-clause also plays a pragmatic role in restricting the domain of the embedding quantifier. That an appeal to pragmatics should be necessary at all goes with Edgington’s verdict that ‘we do not have a satisfactory general account of sentences with conditional constituents’.

Undercutting Defeat and Edgington’s Burglar

Defeasible reasons are normally thought of as mental states of some kind. In the verbal tradition, at least, reputable philosophers sometimes react to this fact as if the whole idea of a defeasible reason is based on some kind of conceptual confusion or category mistake. Their idea, basically, is that the English word ‘reason’ already has a meaning which rules out mental states as part of its extension. For this reason they see the idea of mental states as reasons as itself utter confusion. This chapter does four things. It lays out an orthodox position on reasons and defeaters. Then it argues that the position just sketched is mistaken about ‘undercutting’ defeaters. Then it explains an unpublished thought experiment by Dorothy Edgington. And then it uses that thought experiment to ground a new approach to undercutting defeaters.

Counterfactuals and Probability

Dorothy Edgington has been a resolute defender of an NTV account of conditionals, according to which a conditional does not express a proposition that makes a categorical claim about the world, but instead make a qualified claim, or express a conditional belief, qualified by or conditional on the proposition expressed by the antecedent. Unlike some philosophers who defend an NTV view for indicative conditionals, but not for subjunctive or counterfactual conditionals, Edgington argues for the more radical thesis that both kinds of conditionals should be given a non-propositional analysis. This chapter considers Edgington’s NTV account of subjunctive conditionals, the role of objective probability in the account, and its relation to the possible-worlds propositional analysis of subjunctive conditionals.

Counterfactuals to the Rescue

A central question for any theory of the interpretation of conditionals is what can be held constant and what must bce given up on the face of a counterfactual supposition. This chapter brings grammatical evidence to bear on the question from polarity reversal, the phenomenon where positive polarity items can exceptionally, albeit systematically, appear in the scope of negation in the antecedent of counterfactual conditionals. Taking polarity sensitive expressions to be associated with alternatives and to give rise to scalar assertions, it shows that polarity reversal can result in scalar assertions because in making a counterfactual assumption any contextual entailments are given up once the information that gives rise to them is revised. The analysis reveals the role that contextual information tied to presuppositions plays in determining a particular type of dependency between facts.

Prefaces, Sorites and Guides to Reasoning

Is there an interesting relation between the Preface paradox and the Sorites paradox that might be used to illuminate either or both of those paradoxes and the phenomena of rationality and vagueness with which they, respectively, are bound up? In particular, if we consider the analogy alongside a familiar response to the Preface Paradox that employs degrees of belief, does this give any support to the thought that we should adopt some kind of degree-theoretic treatment of vagueness and the sorites? This chapter argues that it does not; indeed exploring the disanalogies contributes to a case against such a treatment of vagueness more generally. Among other views, it considers Edgington’s account of vagueness that employs a probabilistic structure of ‘verities’. It then contends that appeal to the framework of supervaluationism yields a better guide to reasoning in vague language than the degree-theoretic treatment can sustain.

Hysteresis Hypotheses

This chapter assimilates the Sorites Paradox and the Preface Paradox, drawing parallels between reasoning with uncertainty and reasoning with vague concepts (a theme that Dorothy Edgington has explored). It discusses experiments in which subjects are taken along soritical series of coloured patches, displaying so-called reverse hysteresis in their responses. The chapter offers an explanation of why reverse hysteresis is rational there. It presents a variant of the Preface Paradox—the Progressive Preface Paradox—that is analogous to the Sorites Paradox and its associated experiments, and it offers an analogous explanation of why reverse hysteresis is again rational. The explanation’s central idea is that ‘belief’ is context-dependent.

A Note on Conditionals and Restrictors

Within linguistic semantics, it is near orthodoxy that the function of the word ‘if’ (in most cases) is to mark restrictions on quantification. Despite its linguistic prominence, this view of the word ‘if’ has played little role in the philosophical discussion of conditionals. This chapter tries to fill in this gap by systematically discussing the impact of the restrictor view on the competing philosophical views of conditionals. The chapter argues that most philosophical views can and should be understood in a way that is compatible with the restrictor view, but that accepting the restrictor view allows for new responses to some prominent arguments for non-truth-conditional account of conditionals.