Single scoreboard semantics

Philosophical Studies

Volumn 119, Issue 1-2, 2004, Pages 1-21

  DeRose, Keith ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 33748327797     PISSN: 00318116     EISSN: 15730883     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/b:phil.0000029347.01790.f2     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. "Scorekeeping in a Language Game", Journal of Philosophical Logic 8 (1979), pp. 339-359.
2. It is tempting - indeed, almost irresistible - to describe the situation as one in which the skeptic is trying to raise the standards for knowledge, while her opponent is trying to keep the standards low. But since what I am here calling the standards for knowledge are the standards a subject must meet for her to be truthfully credited with "knowledge", our debaters need not even be thinking of the standards, so construed, as being something that can be changed. They can be operating under the invariantist assumption that the truth conditions for knowledge sentences remain fixed. Thus, they shouldn't be said to be trying to have an effect on the standards, so construed, which is why I instead described them as executing certain conversational maneuvers which have tendencies to put (or keep) in place certain standards. Typically, though, our debaters will be trying to change or affect other standards: the standards for when a subject will be accepted as "knowing" in their conversation, for instance. But they may conceive of themselves then as trying to get those latter standards in line with the "true" standards - those that articulate the conditions under which a subject can be truthfully said to "know" - as trying to get their opponent to admit the truth of the matter under discussion.
3. Here my use of the metaphor "scoreboard" differs from Lewis's. For Lewis, there is a scoreboard "in the head" of each of the participants, and what the score is can be a function in part of what all these different scoreboards say the score is. As I use "scoreboard" here, it by definition gives the right score.
4. The need to stress the point of this paragraph was pointed out to me by Robert Stalnaker.
5. Due to his different use of "scoreboard," described above in note 3, Lewis would not describe the position he tends toward as one in which there is a single "scoreboard": He uses the term so that each speaker does have their own scoreboard in their head. However, Lewis does seem to assume in his writing that there is a single (though changeable) conversational score in a given conversation, rather than writing as if each there is a different score for each speaker, and thus seems to be working with the picture that in my use of the term has a single "scoreboard".
6. "Scorekeeping in a Language Game", p. 355.
7. One could quite plausibly understand Lewis differently here. For instance, if the force of Lewis's "must" is understood differently, this passage could be read as being compatible with the multiple scoreboards view that both the skeptic and her opponent are speaking the truth. Perhaps if Lewis's "commonsensical epistemologist" were to insist that he does "know," his claim would have the low, ordinary truth conditions, and would therefore be true, according to Lewis. The sense in which he "must" concede defeat, on this reading, is that if he is to speak properly, he must not make such an ordinary, low claim in response to the skeptic. Still, on this reading, a defiant response would be, though improper, true.
8. David Lewis, "Elusive Knowledge", Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (1996), pp. 549-567.
9. There are ways to use "ignore" so that one can be said to be "ignoring" something that in some sense one is attending to: In a philosophical discussion, I am paying very careful attention to a certain objection that has just been raised, planning to craft a response later, but I am properly described as "ignoring" it as I proceed, in that I don't alter what I am now saying as a result of it. Similarly, if a skeptic brings to our attention a certain possibility of error, it seems to me that in a very good and relevant sense, we can choose to "ignore" it, even as we are thinking about it by, for instance, treating it as something not worth worrying about. But in "Elusive Knowledge," Lewis seems to me to use "ignore" in such a way that if you are at all attending to a possibility, you are thereby not ignoring it.
10. Throughout this paper, I have been considering only cases where just two speakers are involved in a conversation, and have been ignoring questions raised by cases where there are more than two speakers. Suppose, for instance, that there are 20 people, say, in a meeting of a philosophy seminar, discussing whether a certain character "knows" a certain fact. Suppose the seminar is not on the topic of skepticism, but rather concerns trying to formulate conditions for knowledge in light of Gettier examples. 19 of the 20 converge on personally adopting a certain set of very ordinary standards, while just one personally indicates other, very different, much higher standards. The one hold-out does not play a leading role in the discussion, making soft-spoken contributions ("Well, I think Henry doesn't know, because for all he knows, he's a brain in a vat"), which are scoffed at and otherwise ignored by others, only every so often. With so much agreement on a particular set of standards in the room, are we to suppose that this lone holdout creates a situation in which the "knows" scoreboard explodes, or in which a huge gap is created in the truth conditions of everyone's claims? I'm not sure what to say, but it's tempting here to resort to a Lewisism (from "Scorekeeping," though Lewis uses it about a different kind of case) and say that if the character under discussion does meet the dominant standards in the room (the standards employed by the 19), then the claims of the 19 that the character does "know" are at least "true enough." Perhaps, though, the claims of the lone hold-out go gappy: When he claims that the character doesn't "know", his claim is true iff the character doesn't meet either his own personally indicated standards or the dominant standards in the room; his claim is false iff the character meets both sets of standards; and if, as I'm supposing, the character meets the dominant standards in the conversation, but fails to meet our hold-out's personally indicated standards, the hold-out's claim is neither true nor false.