Urmson's Scales

The greatest English philosopher(* -- I justify this elsewhere), J. O. Urmson, writes of 'scale':

As in




or more generally





where 's' stands for 'strong' and 'w' for 'weak' in strict entailment terms:

The uttering of 'w' implicates but does not entail "- s"


Urmson quotes "know" on p.192 of his brilliant essay as among the verbs ('philosophical war horse') which philosophes tend to "misconstrue".

He notes that the verb, "to know", does not _usually_ report a psychological
event the way "I believe" does. (For indeed, the psychological attitude of 'knowing' _IS_ believing).


"While the difficulty of regarding 'I know' as if they reported a
contemorary event (as if we said:

(1) I am knowing that the cat is on the mat.

has been appreciated, many philosophers tend to treat "I know" (or "he
knows) as if it were simply _defective_ of a present continuous tense."


cfr. I forget.


What have you been doing yesterday?

I've been learning Grammar
I've been KNOWING (???) Grammar
I've been FORGETTING (*??) grammar
I've been meaning that the cat is on the mat.

etc.


Urmson: "Thus, 'I know' has been construed as an ordinary present perfect implying,
not the frequent truth of 'I am knowing', but of 'I am doing this thing'
(p.195)."

Urmson classes "know" in a Group III of Parenthetical (along with "believe", "guess", "suppose", "estimate" and "feel").

He notes: "The group is probably more controversial than the previous ones and will require more explanation".


"'I know' shows that there is all the evidence one could need"."


URMSONS BRINGS HIS SCALES:



"Some of these verbs can

clearly

be arranged in a scale

showing the reliablity

of the conjoined statement according

to the wealth of evidence:


(2)



(Echoes of Horn!). -- and cfr. Austin's remark in 'Other Minds' discussed
in previous post, that "know" is _not_ in a higher scale than "believe"!

---

Some dispute within Oxford.

Urmson correlates "know" with the adverb "certainly" and "believe" with "probably".

And warns:

"This is _not_ I repeat, a list of synonyms: "p, I know." is _not_ synonymous to "Certainly, p."

Urmson compares "know" with "guess" -- which he describes as not describing a mental state at all -- and writes:

"I cannot see that there is any essential difference between "guess" and "know" (or "believe", for that matter). The epistemological situation is more complicated in the latter set, and some of them have special QUIRKS in their use, "know" being a
notorious example, but that is all. They are essentially the same sort of
verb."

Urmson comments on Austin's 'Other Minds'.

(Upon Austin's death, he will edit his Philosophical Papers and How to do things with words -- vide, How to do things with Urmson, This blog).


"Austin is careful not to
say that "know" is a performative.".

i. it was an ugly word.
ii. it was an otiose word, since 'operative' was already there.

Urmson notes the awkwardness of

(3) I was knowing that it was raining.

(or "I was believing", for that matter). Urmson notes an asymmetry between
"believe" and "know" which concerns factiveness:

"what is said to be
believed by others, or by oneself, in the past, is NOT in general implied
to be "true" by the utterer (there are exceptions, 'know' being an obvious
example)."

The conversational implicature of "know" which is inherited is
as follows.

"If the point of 'I know that p' is, roughly, to signal
complete trustworthiness for a statement made in the BEST EVIDENTIAL
CONDITIONS, then the point of _other_ usages of the verb may be said with
reasonably accuracy to be the assertion that somebody else, or oneself at
another time, was in a position in which he was entitled to say 'I know'".


Urmson notes,

"'know' contrasts thus with 'deduce': one can say:

(4) John deduced that p.

"where we are not ourselves prepared to treat "p" as a legitimate
deduction, which is a difference from a case of knowledge".

But this has been challenged, too.

"He proved that you were stupid"
"And you believed him?"
"I mean, he proved it to me that you were stupid"
"And you believed him?"
"Well, he did prove it"
"But surely Urmson is right and you can say, even, that,
for all you care, he might have even _deduced_ it
to you that I'm stupid. Surely no ground to go on
and believe yourself that his deduction was right"

"Are you suggesting that _he_ was stupid, then?"
"I'm not suggesting anything. I'm saying".