Table Of ContentKnowledge and Presuppositions
Knowledge and
Presuppositions
Michael Blome-Tillmann
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For Alicia
Acknowledgements
In preparing this monograph I benefited from discussions at a number
of workshops, conferences, and colloquia in Aberdeen, Beijing, Berlin,
Bielefeld, Bologna, Bristol, Cologne, Harvard, Irvine, Leeds, Leuven,
Lisbon, Manchester, Milan, MIT, Montreal, Munich, Oxford, Paris, St
Andrews, Southampton, Winnipeg, and York. I am very grateful to the
many philosophers who have provided comments on these and other
occasions, especially to Yuval Avnur, Kent Bach, Tom Baldwin, Sven
Bernecker, Alexander Bird, Wylie Breckenridge, Jessica Brown, Igor
Douven, Julian Dutant, Philip Ebert, Pascal Engel, Mikkel Gerken,
Ephraim Glick, Owen Greenhall, Thomas Grundmann, Bruno Guindon,
John Hawthorne, Jonathan Ichikawa Jenkins, Stephen Kearns, Christoph
Kelp, Dustin Locke, Rory Madden, Ofra Magidor, Andrew McCarthy,
Matt McGrath, Daniel Morgan, Sarah Moss, Jennifer Nagel, Ian Phillips,
Duncan Pritchard, François Recanati, Jay Rosenberg, Patrick Rysiew,
Markus Schrenk, Nico Silins, Robert Stalnaker, Jason Stanley, Daniel
Star, Robert J. Stephenson, Eric Swanson, Bruno Whittle, and Stephen
G. Williams.
For extensive comments on predecessors and earlier versions of one
or another part of this monograph I am indebted to Brian Ball, Stewart
Cohen, Dorothy Edgington, Ram Neta, Ralph Wedgwood, and Crispin
Wright. Special thanks are due to Timothy Williamson, who supervised
my 2007 DPhil thesis, from which parts of this monograph emerged. I am
most grateful to him for being in turns encouraging, demanding, patient,
critical, and supportive.
Parts of this monograph were written during my time as a Junior
Research Fellow at University College, Oxford. I am grateful to the
Fellowship at Univ for this opportunity and for being so welcoming
and supportive. Special thanks go to Bill Child, James Morauta, Tiffany
Stern, John Wilson, Nick Yeung, and the Thursday ‘young persons’ posse.
I would also like to thank my current employer, McGill University, for
giving me the flexibility that I needed to finish the monograph. Finally,
I would like to thank the organizations and funding agencies that kindly
supported my research, the Arts and Humanities Research Council,
viii Acknowledgements
the ANALYSIS Trust, the Old Members’ Trust of University College, the
Cyrill and Phillis Long Trust of The Queen’s College, Oxford, the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, McGill University,
and the Fonds de Recherche sur la Société et la Culture du Québec.
I have drawn, with kind permission in each case, on previously pub-
lished material, as detailed below. I thank the editors and publishers con-
cerned for permission to use this material; in particular, I thank Blackwell
Publishing, Oxford University Press, Springer Science+Business Media,
and Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. Chapters 1 and 2 are drawn from my paper
‘Knowledge and Presuppositions,’ Mind 118(470): 241–94 (2009). Chapter 2.5
is drawn from ‘Contextualism and the Epistemological Enterprise,’
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, CVII (2007), pp. 387–94. Chapter 3.6
is based on ‘Presuppositional Epistemic Contextualism and the Problem
of Known Presuppositions,’ New Essays on Knowledge Ascriptions, Mikkel
Gerken & Jessica Brown (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press (2012).
Parts of Chapter 3.6 are loosely based on ‘Contextualism, Subject-Sensitive
Invariantism, and the Interaction of “Knowledge”-Ascriptions with Modal
and Temporal Operators,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
79(2): 315–31 (2009), and parts of Chapter 4 are drawn from parts of ‘The
Indexicality of “Knowledge’,’ ’ Philosophical Studies 138(1): 29–53 (2008), while
Chapter 4.2 is based on ‘Contextualism and the Knowledge Norms,’ 2013
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 94(1): 89–100 and Chapter 6 on ‘Solving the
Moorean Puzzle,’ forthcoming in Philosophical Studies.
Finally, I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to my parents and my wife
Alicia, without whom this book would not exist.
M.B.-T.
Cambridge, UK
July 1st, 2013
Contents
List of Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
Outline of the Book 5
1. Knowledge and Presuppositions 11
1.1 Epistemic Contextualism 11
1.2 Knowledge and Relevant Alternatives 16
1.3 Pragmatic Presuppositions 22
1.4 Presuppositional Epistemic Contextualism (PEC) 29
1.5 Concluding Remarks 35
2. The Sceptical Puzzle 36
2.1 Sceptical Intuitions and Other Data 36
2.2 Scepticism in Solitary Contexts 39
2.3 Scepticism in Conversational Contexts 41
2.4 PEC’s Error-theory 43
2.5 Epistemological Irrelevance 49
2.6 Elusiveness, Ineffability, and Unassertability 52
2.7 Concluding Remarks 62
3. Objections and Replies 63
3.1 Solitary Contexts 63
3.2 Too Easy Knowledge? 64
3.3 Epistemically Legitimate Presuppositions 66
3.4 Presupposing vs. Assuming 71
3.5 Irrational Sceptics? 74
3.6 Known Presuppositions 75
3.7 Modal Embeddings and Factivity 87
3.8 Concluding Remarks 95
4. Linguistic Issues 96
4.1 Semantic Blindness 96
4.2 Knowledge Norms 111
4.3 The Syntax of ‘Knowledge’ 118
4.4 Clarification Techniques 125
4.5 Concluding Remarks 134
5. Further Puzzles 136
5.1 Gettier Cases 136
5.2 The Lottery Puzzle 140
