Belief, Credence, and Pragmatic Encroachment
Jake Ross2011
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Abstract
This paper compares two alternative explanations of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge (i.e., the claim that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors). After reviewing the evidence for such pragmatic encroachment, we ask how it is best explained, assuming it obtains. Several authors have recently argued that the best explanation is provided by a particular account of belief, which we call pragmatic credal reductivism. On this view, what it is for an agent to believe a proposition is for her credence in this proposition to be above a certain threshold, a threshold that varies depending on pragmatic factors. We show that while this account of belief can provide an elegant explanation of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge, it is not alone in doing so, for an alternative account of belief, which we call the reasoning disposition account, can do so as well. And the latter account, we argue, is far more plausible than pragmatic credal reductivism, since it accords f...
Related papers
Belief, Credence, and Pragmatic Encroachment 1
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2012
This paper compares two alternative explanations of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge (i.e., the claim that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors). After reviewing the evidence for such pragmatic encroachment, we ask how it is best explained, assuming it obtains. Several authors have recently argued that the best explanation is provided by a particular account of belief, which we call pragmatic credal reductivism. On this view, what it is for an agent to believe a proposition is for her credence in this proposition to be above a certain threshold, a threshold that varies depending on pragmatic factors. We show that while this account of belief can provide an elegant explanation of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge, it is not alone in doing so, for an alternative account of belief, which we call the reasoning disposition account, can do so as well. And the latter account, we argue, is far more plausible than pragmatic credal reductivism, since it accords far better with a number of claims about belief that are very hard to deny. Recently, a quandary has arisen in the literature on pragmatic encroachment. On the one hand, it has been forcefully argued that there is pragmatic encroachment on knowledge, or in other words that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors such as the costs of acting as if it were true that p when it is not true. And it has been argued that the best way to explain pragmatic encroachment on knowledge is by assuming that pragmatic factors affect justified belief. On the other hand, it is widely held that there is no pragmatic encroachment on justified degrees of belief, or levels of confidence, as the latter, it is maintained, should be strictly apportioned to the evidence. 2 But this creates a problem. How can pragmatic factors affect whether we are justified in believing a proposition (as opposed to disbelieving it or withholding judgment concerning it) without affecting the degree of belief or level of confidence that we are justified in
How Belief-Credence Dualism Explains Away Pragmatic Encroachment
The Philosophical Quarterly, 2019
Belief-credence dualism is the view that we have both beliefs and credences and neither attitude is reducible to the other. Pragmatic encroachment is the view that stakes alone can affect the epistemic rationality of states like knowledge or justified belief. In this paper, I argue that dualism offers a unique explanation of pragmatic encroachment cases. First, I explain pragmatic encroachment and what motivates it. Then, I explain dualism and outline a particular argument for dualism. Finally, I show how dualism can explain the intuitions that underlie pragmatic encroachment. My basic proposal is that in high stakes cases, it is not that one cannot rationally believe that p; instead, one ought not to rely on one's belief that p. One should rather rely on one's credence in p. I conclude that we need not commit ourselves to pragmatic encroachment in order to explain the intuitiveness of the cases that motivate it.
Evidence against pragmatic encroachment
Philosophical Studies, 2015
We argue that a certain version of pragmatic encroachment, according to which one knows that p only if one's epistemic position with respect to p is practically adequate, has a problematic consequence: one can lose knowledge that p by getting evidence for p, and conversely, one can gain knowledge that p by getting evidence against p. We first describe this version of pragmatic encroachment, and then we defend that it has the problematic consequence. Finally, we deal with a worry that the consequence we find problematic is not, in fact, problematic.
The Pragmatics of Pragmatic Encroachment (penultimate)
Synthese, 2014
The goal of this paper is to defend Simple Modest Invariantism (SMI) about knowledge from the threat presented by pragmatic encroachment. Pragmatic encroachment is the view that practical circumstances are relevant in some way to the truth of knowledge ascription —and if this is true, it would entail the falsity of SMI. Drawing on Ross and Schroeder’s recent Reasoning Disposition account of belief, I argue that the Reasoning Disposition account, together with Grice’s Maxims, gives us an attractive pragmatic account of the connection between knowledge ascriptions and practical circumstances. This gives us the ability to explain away the data that is supposed to support pragmatic encroachment. Finally, I address three important objections to the view offered by giving a pragmatic account of when it is conversationally appropriate to cancel a conversational implicature, and discussing when sentences with true content can end up sounding false as well as cases where sentences with false content can end up sounding true.
Pragmatic Encroachment: it's not just about Knowledge
There is pragmatic encroachment on some epistemic status just in case whether a proposition has that status for a subject depends not only on the subject’s epistemic position with respect to the proposition, but also on features of the subject’s nonepistemic, practical environment. Discussions of pragmatic encroachment usually focus on knowledge. Here we argue that, barring infallibilism, there is pragmatic encroachment on what is arguably a more fundamental epistemic status – the status a proposition has when it is warranted enough to be a reason one has for believing other things.
On believing indirectly for practical reasons
Philosophical Studies, 2021
It is often argued that there are no practical reasons for belief because we could not believe for such reasons. A recent reply by pragmatists is that we can often believe for practical reasons because we can often cause our beliefs for practical reasons. This paper reveals the limits of this recently popular strategy for defending pragmatism, and thereby reshapes the dialectical options for pragmatism. I argue that the strategy presupposes that reasons for being in non-intentional states are not reducible to reasons to act. Pragmatists who want to preserve a motivational constraint on reasons therefore have exactly two options: either arguing that there are irreducible reasons for being in non-intentional states (new pragmatism); or arguing that we can believe directly for practical reasons (traditional pragmatism). I argue that the prospects for the former option are dim because irreducible reasons to be in states are hard to square with the motivational constraint on reasons. Ret...
Belief, Credence, and the Preface Paradox
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2016
Many discussions of the “preface paradox” assume that it is more troubling for deductive constraints on rational belief if outright belief is reducible to credence. I show that this is an error: we can generate the problem without assuming such reducibility. All we need are some very weak normative assumptions about rational relationships between belief and credence. The only view that escapes my way of formulating the problem for the deductive closure constraint is in fact itself a reductive view: namely, the view that outright belief is credence 1. However, I argue that this view is unsustainable. Moreover, my version of the problem turns on no particular theory of evidence or evidential probability, and so cannot be avoided by adopting some revisionary such theory. In sum, deductive constraints are in more serious, and more general, trouble than some have thought.
Pragmatic Encroachment : entailments and evaluation
2018
Call these requirements the traditional epistemic requirements, and call the features which satisfy these requirements the traditional epistemic features. Pragmatic Encroachment is the view that, in addition to these traditional epistemic requirements, knowledge ascriptions are true only if they meet some pragmatic requirement. More perspicuously, Pragmatic Encroachment is the view that two subjects, S a and S b , can, if their practical situations are sufficiently different, differ with respect to knowing p, even though they are just alike with respect to the traditional epistemic features. Two comments. First, I'm not attempting to give, or for that matter even concern myself with, an analysis of knowledge here. Second, I've chosen to describe the traditional epistemic requirements as requirements on the truth conditions of knowledge ascriptions rather than requirements on knowledge. Doing this has a cost and a benefit. The cost is that it's either confusing or cumbersome. It's initially confusing because it makes epistemology appear to be a study of knowledge ascriptions, which it is not. It is a study of knowledge. However, if the disquotational schema ["S knows that p," iff S knows that p] is true, then any knowledge ascription claim can be converted into a knowledge claim, and this would remove the confusion. But, constantly using the disquotational schema is cumbersome. The benefit of describing the traditional epistemic requirements in terms of knowledge ascriptions is that it makes contrasting Pragmatic Encroachment with nearby views, Contextualism in particular, much easier. This is because Contextualism is a semantic thesis that can only be expressed by talking about knowledge ascriptions-it doesn't make sense to talk about Contextualism's requirements on knowledge. But, Pragmatic Encroachment and Strict Invariantism can be characterized in terms of knowledge ascriptions, albeit awkwardly, with the help of the
Pragmatic Encroachment and Belief-Desire Psychology
Analytic Philosophy, 2012
We develop a novel challenge to pragmatic encroachment. The significance of belief-desire psychology requires treating questions about what to believe as importantly prior to questions about what to do; pragmatic encroachment undermines that priority, and therefore undermines the significance of belief-desire psychology. This, we argue, is a higher cost than has been recognized by epistemologists considering embracing pragmatic encroachment.
A Pragmatistic Approach to Propositional Knowledge Based on the Successful Behavior of Belief
Every belief has a life that goes from the agent having the belief now, the transmission of the belief to other agents, and the persistence of the belief through time. In this article we propose the idea that the belief can be said to be successful in relation to any of these respects. We will call them, respectively, the first, second, and third person perspective on knowledge and investigate the requisite properties of these three perspectives. We do not base our approach on the notion of truth as is common, or on the notion of justification, which is another basis. Our concern is not with knowledge as corresponding to truth but knowledge as corresponding to stable belief.
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How to argue for pragmatic encroachment
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Philosophical Studies, 2018
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Paradigmatically, epistemic akrasia occurs when a subject believes some proposition p and simultaneously believes that her belief that p is irrational (Horowitz 2014). This characterization is broad enough to admit of further precisification of a subject's possible mental states. For example, if a subject believes p despite taking p to be highly unlikely, she may take this low credence to suggest that her belief is irrational. Then she too counts as akratic. In this paper, we wish to call attention to cases like these. Let's consider a particular example. Taylor believes that her close friends and family think ill of her. She knows that this is an irrational thing for her to believe, especially since she knows her only apparent evidence is that she and they have been speaking less lately. This lack of communication, she admits to herself, is easily and plausibly explained by the fact that she has just moved to a new country to start a demanding job. Thus, she has a low credence that they think ill of her. Still, she believes it, despite her low confidence that it is true. Taylor's case is one of epistemic akrasia: she believes p, but knows she ought not believe p.
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Credal reductivism is the view that outright belief is reducible to degrees of confidence or “credence.” The most popular versions of credal reductivism all have the consequence that if you are near-maximally confident that p in a low-stakes situation, then you outright believe p. This paper addresses a recent objection to this consequence—the Correctness Objection—introduced by Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath and further developed by Jacob Ross and Mark Schroeder. The objection is that near-maximal confidence cannot entail outright belief because when you believe a false proposition, you are wrong or incorrect, whereas you can be highly confident of a false proposition in a low-stakes situation without being incorrect (provided, at least, that you’re not absolutely certain). Both Fantl and McGrath’s and Ross and Schoeder’s versions of the Correctness Objection admit of multiple interpretations. But it is argued that even on the most charitable interpretations the objection fails.
The pragmatics of belief
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Knowledge, Presupposition, and Pragmatic Implicature.pdf
It is widely accepted that knowledge is factive, but two different understandings of "factivity" should be distinguished, namely, the implication version and the presupposition version. While the former only takes the truth of P as a necessary requirement for "S knows that P," the latter considers it also necessary for "S does not know that P." In this paper, I argue against presupposition and defend implication. More specifically, I argue against Wang and Tai's defense of the presupposition version as presented in a recent paper and propose a pragmatic response to the "persistence problem" of implication. In other words, my positive proposal is an account of implication plus pragmatic implicature. To conclude, I use my version to analyze Wang and Tai's distinction between inner skepticism and outer skepticism. My conclusion is that, after abandoning presupposition, we can identify two types of intermediate skepticism between Wang and Tai's inner and outer skepticism.
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This paper examines the prospects of a prima facie attractive response to Fantl and McGrath's argument for pragmatic encroachment. The response concedes that if one knows a proposition to be true then that proposition is warranted enough for one to have it as a reason for action. But it denies pragmatic encroachment, insofar as it denies that whether one knows a proposition to be true can vary with the practical stakes, holding fixed strength of warrant. This paper explores two ways to allow knowledge-reason links without pragmatic encroachment, both of which appeal to defeat. The first appeals to defeaters of reasons. If you know the bank is open tomorrow, what you know is available as a reason, but it may be defeated by considerations concerning the stakes. The second appeals to defeaters which do not defeat reasons but which nonetheless do something similar: they make the action recommended by those reasons vicious. In a high stakes case performing the "risky" action would be vicious even if it is justified in the sense of being supported by undefeated reasons. What is defeated is a virtue-based epistemic status rather than reasons or justification. I argue that neither proposal halts the march from a knowledge-reason link to pragmatic encroachment.
On Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2007
We argue, contrary to epistemological orthodoxy, that knowledge is not purely epistemic—that knowledge is not simply a matter of truth-related factors (evidence, reliability, etc.). We do this by arguing for a pragmatic condition on knowledge, KA: if a subject knows that p, then she is rational to act as if p. KA, together with fallibilism, entails that knowledge is not purely epistemic. We support KA by appealing to the role of knowledge-citations in defending and criticizing actions, and by giving a principled argument for KA, based on the inference rule KB: if a subject knows that A is the best thing she can do, she is rational to do A. In the second half of the paper, we consider and reject the two most promising objections to our case for KA, one based on the Gricean notion of conversational implicature and the other based on a contextualist maneuver.
Putting the Pragmatics of Belief to Work
Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 2013
In earlier work, I argued that pragmatic considerations similar to those that Grice has shown to pertain to assertability pertain also to the epistemic notion of acceptability; in addition to the pragmatics of assertion, there is what I called "the pragmatics of belief." In this paper, the pragmatics of belief is applied to a puzzle related to the so-called Lottery Paradox and is shown to help resolve that puzzle.
Remarks on the cognitive base of pragmatic principles
Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 2005
The present paper aims at the exemplification of the applicability of plausibility analysis to linguistics. Starting from the criticism of Robinson (1997), the paper argues for two assumptions. Firstly, as opposed to a theory of distributed systems, it is a theory of plausible reasoning that is capable of capturing basic methodological problems of theory formation in pragmatics (such as circularity, category error, the arbitrariness of interpretations of data and the objectification of the theorist's cultural and linguistic knowledge as principles of language behaviour). Secondly, the cognitive base of pragmatic principles is inferential and plausibilistic, rather than non-inferential and probabilistic. * Work on the present paper was supported by the Research Group for Theoretical Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at the University of Debrecen. We are grateful to Károly Bibok, János László, Enikő Németh T. and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. Our special thanks are due to George Seel for improving our English. None of these people are responsible for the shortcomings of our paper.
Pragmatic Encroachment and Epistemically Responsible Action
One prominent argument for pragmatic encroachment (PE) is that PE is entailed by a combination of a principle that states that knowledge warrants proper practical reasoning, and judgments that it is more difficult to reason well when the stakes go up. I argue here that this argument is unsuccessful. One problem is that empirical tests concerning knowledge judgments in high-stakes situations only sometimes exhibit the result predicted by PE. I argue here that those judgments that appear to support PE are better interpreted not as judgments that the epistemic demands for knowing increase as one’s practical situation becomes more demanding, but instead as judgments reflecting a different kind of normative epistemic evaluation, namely whether one is acting in an epistemically responsible way. The general idea is that when someone treats a proposition as a reason for acting we can evaluate them epistemically both in terms of whether they know that proposition, as well as in terms of whether they are acting on their knowledge in the right kind of way. My charge against the PE proponent, then, is that she is interpreting judgments that are indicative of whether we are adhering to certain normative epistemic requirements generally as being indicative of whether we have knowledge specifically. There are, however, normative epistemic requirements that make demands of us that are indicative of something other than our possession of knowledge.
Epistemic Utility and Norms for Credences
Philosophy Compass, 2013
Beliefs come in different strengths. An agent's credence in a proposition is a measure of the strength of her belief in that proposition. Various norms for credences have been proposed. Traditionally, philosophers have tried to argue for these norms by showing that any agent who violates them will be lead by her credences to make bad decisions. In this article, we survey a new strategy for justifying these norms. The strategy begins by identifying an epistemic utility function and a decision-theoretic norm; we then show that the decision-theoretic norm applied to the epistemic utility function yields the norm for credences that we wish to justify. We survey results already obtained using this strategy, and we suggest directions for future research. Like the rest of us, Paul's beliefs come in degrees. Some are stronger than others. In particular , Paul believes that Linda is a bank teller and a political activist more strongly than he believes that she is a bank teller. That is, his credence in the former proposition is greater than his credence in the latter. Surely, Paul is irrational. But why? 1 In this survey, I describe a new strategy for answering such questions. It is a strategy that was first introduced by Jim Joyce (1998). The traditional strategy-the strategy that Joyce sought to replace or, at least, supplement is to show that such credences will lead the agent who has them to make decisions that are guaranteed to have a bad outcome. These are the well-known Dutch Book arguments. 2 For instance, Paul's credences will lead him to buy a book of bets on the two propositions concerning Linda that is guaranteed to lose him money. This, it is claimed, makes him irrational. Now, the validity of this argument has been the subject of much debate. However, even if it works, it only identifies one way in which Paul's credences are irrational: they are poor guides to action; from a pragmatic point of view, they are irrational. But, intuitively, there is something irrational about these credences from a purely epistemic point of view; they seem to exhibit a purely epistemic flaw. Even for an agent incapable of acting on her credences-and therefore incapable of making the bets that lead to the guaranteed loss-Paul's credences would be irrational. We will be concerned with identifying why that is so. That is, Joyce's strategy, which we describe here, provides a purely epistemic route to the norms that govern credences; this route does not rely on any connection between credence and action. We will begin by showing how the strategy works in the case of Paul. Then, we will show how to extend it to establish probabilism, which is the norm that Joyce considers in his original paper. Probabilism is one of the core tenets of so-called Bayesian episte-mology. Our next target is the other core tenet of that view, namely, conditionalization. We will give an argument for that norm that uses Joyce's strategy as well: it is due to Hilary Greaves and David Wallace (2006). After considering how we might strengthen these arguments by weakening the assumptions they make, we conclude by describing possible avenues for future research.
The Decision Processes of Pragmaticism’s Abductive Inference
This paper outlines the decision processes contained in, and traceable from abductive inference of Pragmaticism theory of inquiry of Charles Sanders Peirce .
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