7th Workshop

7th Nagoya Meta-Philosophy Workshop

Date: 13:00 to 16:15pm, Aug 9, 2019

Venue: Liberal Arts and Sciences Main Building S12, 1st Floor

"Commutativity of Evidence and Default Testimonial Justification"

Masashiro Yamada (Pomona College): 13:00-14:30pm

Abstract: On some prominent and plausible views of testimony, S has (prima facie) justification to believe that p on the basis of testimony by W if S has no reason to doubt W's reliability. This seems to allow W to preempt testimony by others by claiming that T is unreliable: If S has no reason to doubt W's reliability, W's testimony gives S justification to believe that T is unreliable, and that is reason to doubt T's reliability and will therefore prevent S from believing T's claims on the basis of T's testimony. On the other hand, if T had managed to talk to S first and claimed W is unreliable, that would have turned the table. But this is in conflict with a basic principle governing evidence known as commutativity: what matters for justification at any given point in time is the total evidence an agent has at that time, and not the order in which the component pieces of evidence were acquired. So it should not matter whether S first talks to W, or to T. I will explore ways to diffuse this tension between the commutativity of evidence and the possibility to justifiably believe on someone's mere say-so.

"Does Linguistic Understanding Require Knowledge of Meaning?"

Ryo Tanaka (University of Connecticut): 14:45-16:15pm

Abstract: In philosophical literature on linguistic meaning, there has been a prominent line of thoughts whose core idea is that understanding linguistic expressions requires possessing the knowledge of their meanings (cf. Dummett (1991, 1996)). This idea gains its support partly from the rationalist intuition that our use of language is essentially rational, and as a rational activity it must be guided by knowledge. However, a competent speaker of a language often finds it difficult to state the content of what she supposedly knows (Schiffer (2003)). This observation, along with some others (cf. Evans (1981)), can give rise to a skeptical attitude concerning the use of the ‘knowledge’ locution in investigations into the nature of linguistic understanding, and in fact several authors explicitly argue against the above described Dummettian-rationalist view (Chomsky (1986), Devitt (1996, 2006), Millikan (2005), Pettit (2002)).

In this talk, I aim to reconcile these two apparently conflicting lines of thought. I argue that a proper reconciliation requires distinguishing the two notions of ‘knowledge of meaning’ (cf. Gross (2010), Smith (2008)). ‘Knowledge of meaning,’ first, could mean the sub-personal cognitive competence that any speaker who has mastered her first language would have to possess. Secondly, ‘knowledge of meaning’ could also mean the propositional kind of knowledge that the speaker would have to appeal to in deploying her language in a critical manner, such as in a case where the speaker intentionally ‘chooses her words’ to decrease ambiguity (cf. Higginbotham (2003)). I call the former ‘minimal knowledge of meaning,’ and the latter ‘rationalizing knowledge of meaning,’ respectively, and argue that the above mentioned two lines of thought can be seen as employing different notions of ‘knowledge.’ In the latter half of the talk, I formulate a novel question that focuses on the relationship between the two kinds of knowledge of meaning. After exploring some possible answers to this question, if time permits, I will sketch my positive proposal, by following the lead of Wilfrid Sellars’ suggestive remarks on the function of semantic vocabulary (Sellars (1956, 1971)).