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A Puzzle About Telling

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Michael Welbourne
Michael Welbourne
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
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Extract

The verb know has the following well-known property. If someone is correctly described as knowing that p then it is the case that p, and if someone is correctly described as knowing wh (what time it is, where the cat is, when lunch will be and so on), then any proposition which spells out what they know in knowing wh will be true.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 64 , Issue 248 , April 1989 , pp. 175 - 185
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1989

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References

1 Vendler, Zeno, ‘Telling the Facts’, in Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language, French, Peter A., Ueling, Theodore E. and Wettstein, Howard K. (eds) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 228Google Scholar. This article is responsible for alerting me to the puzzle about telling which concerns me here. The jargon originated in Kiparsky, Paul and Kiparsky, Carol, ‘Fact’, in Semantics, Steinberg, Danny D. and Jakobivits, Leon A. (eds) (Cambridge University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

2 ‘In these contexts’: there may be others which would support a thesis of equivocation. You can tell someone to do something, you can tell a blackbird when you see one, you can tell a hawk from a handsaw, you can tell your beads. I hunch that not even these cases present us with a radical ambiguity.

3 I first came across this fruitful idea of the intersection of different conceptual schemes in Pears, David, ‘Causes and Objects of some Feelings and Psychological Reactions’, Ratio 4 (1962).Google Scholar

4 I first presented these themes, and in particular the idea that the uptake a teller looks for in his listener is belief (of the speaker), in ‘The Transmission of Knowledge’, The Philosophical Quarterly 29 (1979)Google Scholar. I have elaborated them since in several places, most recently in The Community of Knowledge (Aberdeen University Press, 1986Google Scholar; also Atlantic Highlands (NJ: Humanities Press, 1986).Google Scholar