A thought about contextualism and metalinguistic
negation. (And an invitation to co-author a paper.)

It is well known that some uses of negation in
English are meta-linguistic, rather than (to use a contested term) semantic.
Compare (1) and (2), both of which might express true thoughts in the mouth of
someone with more extreme feelings than I.

(1)      I don’t
like cricket, I love it.
(2)      I don’t like Mondays, I hate
them.

In (2) the negation is the familiar semantic
negation. Someone who utters the first clause of (2) wants to express the
opposite proposition to that expressed by I like Mondays. She
wants to express, in a word, her dislike for
Mondays. This is not what is going on with the person who sincerely utters (1).
Such a person does not dislike cricket, in fact she loves it. So what is going
on with the first clause? Well, she is saying, roughly, that it is inappropriate
to describe her attitude towards cricket by saying she likes it. Such
a saying would not be false, she does after all like cricket, but it would be
too weak.

While both (1) and (2) can be uttered truly, they
cannot be uttered in the same way. Here’s a little experiment. Get yourself
into the frame of mind where you could utter both (1) and (2) sincerely (change
‘cricket’ and ‘Mondays’ for more appropriate words if this makes it easier) and
then listen to how you say each of them. In particular, listen to how you say
the word ‘like’ in each case. If you’re like most people, that word will sound
quite different in the two cases. In the first sentence, there will be an
emphasis on ‘like’, a rising pitch, a slight rise in volume and a small delay
after the word. In the second sentence ‘like’ will feature none of these
features. There will be a drop in pitch and volume, and the word will run
slightly into ‘Mondays’. You might also note that in (2), but not in (1), there’ll
be a noticeable stress on the first syllable after ‘like’.

These aren’t new points, they’re all to be found in
Larry Horn’s magisterial Natural
History of Negation, but it’s worthwhile rediscovering them for
yourself via (1) and (2) I think. Anyway, you might by now be wondering what
this all has to do with contextualism. Well, I was reading again Keith DeRose’s
early papers on contextualism, and in particular reading some of the key
passages aloud (another reason I don’t try doing philosophy on a plane) and I
was struck by the similar effect. So here’s one passage lifted practically verbatim
from DeRose’s 1992 paper Contextualism and Knowledge
Attributions.

Lawyer:    Were
there any zebras in the zoo on April 20?

Me:         Yes.

L:            Do you know that?

M:           Yes.

L:            How do you know?

M:           I saw some there.

L:            So, you knew that
they were zebras?

M:           Yes.

L:            Could you rule out
the possibility that they were cleverly painted mules?

M:           No, I suppose not.

L:            So, did you really
know that they were zebras?

M:           Is there any reason
to think that they were painted mules, of all things?

L:            Just answer the
question!

M:           I guess I didn’t know that
they were zebras.

L:            Aha!
The witness has contradicted his earlier claim. First he says that he knew; now
he says he didn’t. Now which it is, Prof. De Rose?

Emphasis, note, in original. Read this passage
aloud, and note how ‘know’ in line 3 and 5 sounds just like ‘like’ in (2), but
by the penultimate line it sounds just like ‘like’ in (1). In the last line it
is emphasised, but that is, I think, a different phenomenon, the lawyer is
trying to emphasise the point where DeRose has changed his mind. (Despite
DeRose’s defences in the text, I’m with the lawyer on this one. But maybe that’s
just residue of law school bias.)

From the same paper, consider these famous
examples. (Apologies for the long quotes here, but it’s sort of needed to make
the point I’m trying to make.)

Bank Case A. My wife and I are driving home on a Friday
afternoon. We plan to stop at the bank on the way home to deposit our
payckecks. But as we drive past the bank, we notice that the lines inside are
very long, as they often are on Friday afternoons. Although we generally like
to deposit our paychecks as soon as possible, it is not especially important in this case that they be deposited
right away, so I suggest that we drive straight home and deposit our paychecks
on Saturday morning. My wife says, “Maybe the bank won’t be open tomorrow. Lots
of banks are closed on Saturdays.” I reply, “No, I know it’ll be open. I was
just there two weeks ago on Saturday. It’s open until noon.”

Bank Case B. My wife and I drive past the bank on a
Friday afternoon as in Case A, and notice the long lines. I again suggest that
we deposit our paychecks on Saturday morning, explaining that I was at the bank
on Saturday morning only two weeks ago, and discovered that it was open until
noon. But in this case, we have just written a very large and very important check. If our paychecks are not deposited
unto our checking account before Monday morning, the important check we wrote
will bounce, leaving us in a very bad situation. And, of course, the
bank is not open on Sunday. My wife reminds me of these facts. She then says,
“Banks do change their hours. Do you know the bank will be open tomorrow?”
Remaining as confident as I was before that the bank will be open then, still,
I reply, “Well, no. I’d better go in and make sure.”

Assume that in both cases the bank will
be open on Saturday and that there is nothing unusual about either case that
has not been included in my description of it. It seems to me that (1) when I
claim to know that the bank will be open on Saturday in case A, I am saying
something true. But it also seems that (2) I am saying something true in Case B
when I concede that I don’t know that the bank will be open on Saturday.
Yet I seem to be in no better position to know in Case A than in Case B. It is
quite natural to say that (3) If I know that the bank will be open on Saturday
in Case A, then I also know that it will be in Case B.

Read case B aloud, and see how you think the ‘know’
in Keith’s wife’s question sounds. And, although this isn’t in the story, see
how Keith’s answer would sound if he hadn’t used ellipses, but instead
explicitly says, as he does in the commentary afterwards, that he didn’t know
the bank would be open on Saturdays. I think it sounds a lot like how ‘like’
sounds in (1) and rather unlike how ‘like’ sounds in (2). As a final little
experiment, try saying the last thing Keith says in case A with the same tone for
‘know’ that you just used for ‘know’. It should sound rather odd, at best quite
impolite, if you’re agreeing with my intuitions so far.

What I’m suggesting thus far is that in the kinds
of cases where contextualists elicit ‘sceptical’ intuitions, we might have
meta-linguistic rather than semantic negation. And that takes away a fair part
of the motivation for contextualism.

But…

But two issues remain. First, there is a more
conclusive test for a particular negation being meta-linguistic than the
emphasis test. When we have semantic negation we can express the same idea
using a negating prefix, when we have meta-linguistic negation we cannot. So (1a)
is a bad paraphrase of (1), while (2a) is a decent paraphrase of (2).

(1a)    *I
dislike cricket; I love it.
(2a)    I dislike Mondays; I hate them.

It would be good to show the same thing happens
with the knowledge claims in DeRosian examples. Unfortunately, we can’t use
prefixes to negate verbs in English. (Though it would be nice if we could.
Compare He is unhappy with He
unis happy – there’s a narrow difference between them which it
might be useful to exploit from time to time.) Fortunately ‘know’ can behave
like an adjective and we can use prefixes to negate adjectives. So what we need
are cases like the second bank case where it is possible to say (3) but not
(4). (I use all caps to mark which words are stressed.)

(3)      I don’t
KNOW when the bank opens tomorrow.
(4)      The bank’s opening hours tomorrow
are unknown to me.

The problem is that (4) is so
awkward that it’s hard to get firm judgements about it. What is needed is an
argument that in cases like DeRose on the stand, or Bank Case B, no paraphrase
of the sceptical claim in the style of (4), no sentence that is that talks
about which things are known and unknown to subjects, can be appropriate. That
really would show we have meta-linguistic negation here.

Finally, it would be nice to have an explanation
for why we have meta-linguistic
negation here. I have, as dear reader you may have guessed, no such
explanation.

So getting back to the invitation – if anyone can
come up with an argument that we get the kind of distinction between (3) and
(4) that I predict we should get, just like the distinction we actually get
between (1) and (1a), and an explanation for why the negation in (3) is
meta-linguistic, well we should write up a paper saying that it is. Of course,
anyone who can do both of those things may well feel they’ve made the bulk of
the contributions to the said paper, and they’d probably be right, but no one
ever said that jointly authored papers had to include equal contributions from
each author.

(Thanks to Michael Glanzburg and Jeff King
for discussions about meta-linguistic negation, from which I learned most of
the linguistic facts I appeal to above, and to Martijn Blaauw for helpful discussions
about DeRose’s examples.)