Testimony, Pragmatics, and Plausible Deniability

Abstract

I outline what I call the ‘deniability problem’, explain why it is problematic, and identify the range of utterances to which it applies (using religious discourse as an example). The problem is as follows: To assign content to many utterances audiences must rely on their contextual knowledge. This generates a lot of scope for error. Thus, speakers are able to make assertions and deny responsibility for the proposition asserted, claiming that the audience made a mistake. I outline the problem (a limited version of which Fricker 2012 discusses), before explaining why it is problematic. Firstly it blocks testimonial knowledge according to assurance views. Secondly it prevents epistemic buck passing (the importance of which is emphasized by Goldberg 2006 and McMyler 2013). Finally, it removes a key disincentive to dishonesty. The recent literature on context sensitivity (particularly Cappelen and Lepore 2004) seems to entail that the problem applies to a very wide range of utterances. I consider a series of responses which fail to provide a solution, but which help us narrow down the scope of the problem.

Testimony, Recovery and Plausible Deniability: A Response to Peet

“…TBVs are supposed to ward off scepticism about whether testimony based beliefs can be well-justified or constitute knowledge. Peet (2015) presents an argument for the conclusion that TBVs fail at this task: because a speaker frequently uses context-sensitive expressions to express the propositions she asserts to others, a speaker hardly ever performs a public act of taking responsibility for her hearer's belief that p when that belief is formed in response to such assertions. Peet then tries to rein in the scope of this conclusion by describing special kinds of context in which context-sensitivity does not have this devastating effect on the kind of reason described by TBVs.…”

“…That means will probably consist of what Peet calls “knowledge context”: Knowledge context the audience's representation of factors such as mutual knowledge, past utterances, Gricean norms, the mutual goals of the conversation, and any other information generally relevant to interpretation other than basic knowledge of the syntax and invariant semantic content of the utterance. (Peet 2015: 31)…”

“…However, some of the representations in the audience's knowledge context are liable to be false (cf. Peet, 2015: 31). This possibility allows the speaker to plausibly deny that the proposition she intended to tell the audience is the proposition the audience thought the speaker intended to tell the audience.…”

“…The plausibility of such a story will depend on the way I said ‘Matt has three kids’ and the immediate preceding utterances, however we rarely recall such minute details of the conversational context, so it would not be difficult to construct a plausible story on which I intended to communicate only that Matt has at least three children. (Peet 2015: 32–3)…”

“…If this example is representative of what can be done when the speaker makes use of a context-sensitive expression, then, with Peet, it seems that we can generalize: [I]f recovery of an asserted content requires extensive appeal to knowledge context then the speaker will often be able to claim that the audience recovered the wrong proposition, thus disclaiming responsibility for the audience's belief. (Peet 2015: 33)…”