Ignorance, truth, and falsehood Le Morvan, Pierre
Ratio (Oxford),
September 2022, 2022-09-00, 20220901, Volume:
35, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
According to the Ignorance Factivity Thesis, for every proposition p, one is ignorant of p only if p is a truth. By contrast, according to the Ignorance Non‐Factivity Thesis, it is false that, for ...every proposition p, one is ignorant of p only if p is a truth. I argue that, on balance, the case for the latter thesis is stronger than the case for the former.
Properties of the content of the clausal complement have long been assumed to distinguish factive predicates like know from nonfactive ones like think (Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1970, inter alia). There ...is, however, disagreement about which properties define factive predicates, as well as uncertainty about whether the content of the complement of particular predicates exhibits the properties attributed to the content of the complement of factive predicates. This has led to a lack of consensus about which predicates are factive, a troublesome situation given the central role that factivity plays in linguistic theorizing. This article reports six experiments designed to investigate two critical properties of the content of the complement of clause-embedding predicates, namely projection and entailment, with the goal of establishing whether these properties identify a class of factive predicates. We find that factive predicates are more heterogeneous than previously assumed and that there is little empirical support from these experiments for the assumed categorical distinction between factive and nonfactive predicates. We discuss implications of our results for formal analyses of presuppositions, one area where factivity has played a central role. We propose that projection is sensitive to meaning distinctions between clause-embedding predicates that are more fine-grained than factivity.
In this article a parallel is drawn between certain functions of irrealis and imperfective in evaluating contexts in Russian and Polish. The functions of irrealis in complementation are twofold: ...while in propositional complements it reflects irreality, in state-of-affairs complements it reflects temporal and situational unanchoring. This unanchoring function manifests itself also in complements of evaluative (commentative) predicates, where it extracts an event from its situational setting for the purpose of evaluating its intrinsic properties – intrinsic likelihood or desirability. It is argued that the representation of event tokens as event types by means of imperfective verbs in Slavonic performs a similar unanchoring function in evaluative contexts. The data of Slavonic languages, where both unanchoring devices cooccur, enable a coherent explanation of certain hitherto not fully understood phenomena in the domains of mood and aspect and shed a new light on the long-standing problem of the Romance so-called “factive” subjunctive.
The myth of true lies Kallestrup, Jesper
Theoria (Lund, Sweden),
August 2023, Volume:
89, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Suppose you assert a proposition p that you falsely believe to be false with the intention to deceive your audience. The standard view has it that you lied. This paper argues against orthodoxy: ...deceptive lying requires that p be in actual fact false, in addition to your intention to deceive by means of untruthfully asserting that p. We proceed as follows. First, an argument is developed for such falsity condition as the non‐psychological component of lying. The problem with the standard view, we profess, is exactly that lying is a purely psychological relation between disbelief, assertion, and intention. Then, by scrutinising familiar cases, we revisit the alleged intuitive support for the existence of true lies. It turns out these intuitions can be explained away once we reflect on the characteristic deceptive hallmarks that are associated with the distinction between lying and botched attempts at lying. Finally, we examine the morality of lying in the light of said falsity condition. The resultant view emphasises our moral sensitivity to the practical consequences of acts of lying, while still accommodating those moral considerations that pertain exclusively to the psychological components of lying.
How is human social intelligence engaged in the course of ordinary conversation? Standard models of conversation hold that language production and comprehension are guided by constant, rapid ...inferences about what other agents have in mind. However, the idea that mindreading is a pervasive feature of conversation is challenged by a large body of evidence suggesting that mental state attribution is slow and taxing, at least when it deals with propositional attitudes such as beliefs. Belief attributions involve contents that are decoupled from our own primary representation of reality; handling these contents has come to be seen as the signature of full-blown human mindreading. However, mindreading in cooperative communication does not necessarily demand decoupling. We argue for a theoretical and empirical turn towards “factive” forms of mentalizing here. In factive mentalizing, we monitor what others do or do not know, without generating decoupled representations. We propose a model of the representational, cognitive, and interactive components of factive mentalizing, a model that aims to explain efficient real-time monitoring of epistemic states in conversation. After laying out this account, we articulate a more limited set of conversational functions for nonfactive forms of mentalizing, including contexts of meta-linguistic repair, deception, and argumentation. We conclude with suggestions for further research into the roles played by factive versus nonfactive forms of mentalizing in conversation.
•Distinguishes between factive (knowledge-based) and nonfactive (belief-based) mindreading•Factive and nonfactive mindreading carry out distinct functions in everyday conversation•By default, cooperative conversation is supported by factive mindreading•Nonfactive mindreading is called upon only in special communicative contexts•Future research on mentalizing in conversation must reflect the factive/nonfactive distinction
•Focuses on Korean non-factive ‘know’•Explores the relationship between factivity and politeness.•Applies an implicature analysis to its use.•Provides experimental evidence to support ...theory.•Connects behavioural characteristics to politeness usage.
Factivity is often taken advantage of in politeness, as ‘believe’ can be interpreted politely as ‘know’ given contextual considerations. Korean has the distinction of being a language that has a productive non-factive ‘know’ (found in Altaic languages), -uro al-, which does not embed a factive presupposition complement, that is nonetheless supported by limited evidential justification (‘believe’ is not). In terms of politeness, this is an excellent way to indicate disagreement with a social superior, as it works both the negative and positive face of the superior. Therefore, this research aims to understand how non-factive ‘know’ is interpreted as compared to other expressions in terms of politeness and appropriateness, in different power situations. It is clearly demonstrated that non-factive ‘know’ is considered to be the most polite way to indicate disagreement. Moreover, participants’ politeness levels were measured psychometrically, revealing how their choices were influenced by their individual politeness characteristics. This factivity phenomenon is given a clear theoretical treatment in relation to politeness. In sum, researching the relationship between factivity and politeness opens new research avenues in languages which take advantage of the non-factive ‘know’ phenomenon.
Knowledge and Belief Hyman, John
Supplementary volume - Aristotelian Society,
01/2017, Volume:
91
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In this article, I oppose the view that knowledge is a species of belief, and argue that belief should be defined in terms of knowledge, instead of the other way round. However, I reject the idea ...that the concept of knowledge has a primary or basic role or position in our system of mental and logical concepts, because I reject the hierarchical conception of philosophical analysis implicit in this idea. I approach the topic of knowledge and belief from a discussion of Richard Holton’s views about facts and factive verbs.
Frege begins his discussion of factives in ‘On Sense and Reference’ with an example of a purported contrafactive, that is, a verb that entails, or pre-supposes, the falsity of the complement ...sentence. But the verb he cites, ‘wähnen’, is now obsolete, and native speakers are sceptical about whether it really was a contrafactive. Despite the profusion of factive verbs, there are no clear examples of contrafactive propositional attitude verbs in English, French or German (or indeed any other Indo-European languages). This paper attempts to give an explanation of this, and to use this to shed light on the behaviour of factives more generally. The suggestion is that factive propositional attitude verbs take facts, not propositions, as the referents of their complement sentences; and that as there are no contra-facts (merely false propositions), there can be no contrafactives. This claim is also used to help explain Timothy Williamson’s observation that there is no stative propositional attitude factive that requires only belief. Various conclusions are drawn within a broadly ‘knowledge first’ approach.
Factive theory of mind Phillips, Jonathan; Norby, Aaron
Mind & language,
February 2021, 2021-02-00, 20210201, Volume:
36, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Research on theory of mind has primarily focused on demonstrating and understanding the ability to represent others' non‐factive mental states, for example, others' beliefs in the false‐belief task. ...This requirement confuses the ability to represent a particular kind of non‐factive content (e.g., a false belief) with the more general capacity to represent others' understanding of the world even when it differs from one's own. We provide a way of correcting this. We first offer a simple and theoretically motivated account on which tracking another agent's understanding of the world and keeping that representation separate from one's own are the essential features of a capacity for theory of mind. We then show how these criteria can be operationalized in a new experimental paradigm: the “diverse‐knowledge task.”
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