MacFarlane\'s Challenge Against Epistemic Expressivism: A Response

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acceptance of incompatible epistemic standards – (A2) and (B2)– which is invoked to account for the disagreement between them. MacFarlane, however, purports to turn this explanation against the expressivist. He does this by pointing out that we can construct cases in which speakers seem to agree in their atributions of knowledge while holding incompatible epistemic standards. Consider C, who in a similar context to B (that is, with epistemic standards e’), uters ‘S knows that p’. According to the expressivist, C’s uterance expresses: (C1) C’s belief that S’s true belief that p meets epistemic standards e’. (C2) C’s acceptance of epistemic standards e’.

MacFarlane's Challenge Against Epistemic Expressivism: A Response José Ferrer de Luna, University of Granada, Andrés Soria Ruiz, NYU, & José Ramón Torices, University of Granada1 Te purpose of this note is to reply to the challenge that MacFarlane (2014: 192-4) raises against epistemic expressivism as defended by Chrisman (2007, 2012). Chrisman’s aim is to solve the wellestablished contextualist’s p r o b l e m o f lost disagreement2. Chrisman’s way out of this problem proceeds in two steps: frstly, Chrisman adopts what Gibbard calls an oblique strategy (Gibbard 2012: 179), namely to characterize the content of epistemic ascriptions by the mental states that they express, rather than by assigning them truthconditions. Secondly, Chrisman proposes that knowledge ascriptions express complex mental stat es, encompassi ng fact ual beliefs and noncognitive states of epistemic norm acceptance. According to Chrisman (2007: 241), a subject A’s uterance at context c (with epistemic standards e) o f ‘S knows that p’ expresses a complex mental state comprised of: (A1) A’s belief that S’s true belief that p meets epistemic standards e. (A2) A’s acceptance of epistemic standards e.

According to MacFarlane, given that the expressivist invokes the acceptance of incompatible epistemic standards in order to explain the disagreement between A and B, it seems that they should also say in this case that C disagrees with A. However, since A and C both say that S knows that p, it seems much more intuitive to say that A and C agree. Contra MacFarlane, we aim to question the claim that speakers in structurally similar situations to A and C are intuitively best described as agreeing with each other. As we will show, one can fnd cases in which two speakers both ascribe or deny knowledge to a subject but who can hardly be described as agreeing with each other. Speaking alike when ascribing knowledge is not sufcient for diagnosing an agreement between the speakers involved.

On the other hand, B’s negative epistemic ascription at context c’ (with epistemic standards e’) o f ‘S doesn’t know that p’ expresses: (B1) B’s belief that S’s true belief that p does not meet epistemic standards e’. (B2) B’s acceptance of epistemic standards e’.

REFERENCES Blome-Tillman, M. (2015). Skepticism and Contextualism. In Machuca, D. E., & Reed, B. (eds.) Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present: Bloomsbury. Chrisman, M. 2007. From Epistemic Contextualism to Epistemic Expressivism. Philosophical Studies 135: 225– 254. Chrisman, M. 2012. Epistemic Expressivism. Philosophy Compass 7(2): 118–126. Gibbard, A. 2012. Meaning and Normativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacFarlane, J. 2014. Assessment-Sensitivity: Relative Truth and its Applications. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

By introducing the expression of a state of norm acceptance, Chrisman purports to explain the intuition that is problematic for the contextualist: that speakers making apparently contradictory epistemic ascriptions (such as A and B) disagree, even when their ascriptions are licensed by incompatible epistemic standards. In such cases, even though A and B’s uterances express compatible beliefs –(A1) and (B1)–, it is the 1 2

Authors are ordered alphabetically. Tis is a problem for indexical versions of epistemic contextualism. For a recent overview of this and other problems of these positions, see Blome-Tillman (2015) and references therein, as well as MacFarlane (2014: 176-182).

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