CONCESSIVE KNOWLEDGE ATTRIBUTIONS AND FALLIBILISM

Clayton Littlejohn
(Draft of 6.2010)
Lewis thought concessive knowledge attributions (e.g., ‘I know
that Harry is a zebra, but it might be that he’s just a cleverly
disguised mule’) caused serious trouble for fallibilists. As he saw
it, CKAs are overt statements of the fallibilist view and they are
contradictory. Dougherty and Rysiew have argued that CKAs are
pragmatically defective rather than semantically defective. Stanley
thinks that their pragmatic response to Lewis fails, but the
fallibilist cause is not lost because Lewis was wrong about the
commitments of fallibilism. There are problems with Dougherty
and Rysiew’s response to Stanley and that there are problems with
Stanley’s response to Lewis. I’ll offer a defense of fallibilism of
my own and show that fallibilists needn’t worry about CKAs.

INTRODUCTION

Fallibilists think it’s possible for you to know that p is true even if your evidence for believing p
does not entail that p is true.1 Since it seems that most of what we believe about the external world
is based on fallible grounds, infallibilism seems to lead to skepticism. Lewis thought that the
fallibilist faced a serious difficulty because he thought concessive knowledge attributions (CKAs) were
overt statements of the fallibilist’s view and thought they were contradictory. Consider:
(1) I know that Harry is a zebra, but it might be that Harry is
just a painted mule (1996: 550).
Lewis thought that contextualists could be infallibilists without being skeptics, but the rest of us
non-skeptics need to defend fallibilism from his charge that overt statements of fallibilism are
contradictory. In this paper, I want to look at two defenses of fallibilism.2 Rysiew (2001) and

1
Dylan Sabo offered wonderfully helpful comments on an earlier draft of this that was presented at
the Pacific Division meetings of the APA and I want to thank him for his efforts and thank the
audience for their questions. I also want to express my gratitude to an anonymous referee for this
journal for extensive written comments. Finally, thanks to Keith DeRose, Trent Dougherty, Leo
Iacono, Jonathan Ichikawa, Aidan McGlynn, and Andrew Moon for helpful correspondence on
these issues.
2
The authors that I’ll be criticizing here (i.e., Dougherty, Rysiew, and Stanley) defend invariantist
accounts of knowledge and evidence ascription with fallibilist conceptions of knowledge. While
these authors could try to deal with the difficulties that arise for fallibilists by opting for a
contextualist view, they thought that they wouldn’t need to give up on invariantism about
knowledge ascriptions or evidence ascriptions. Like them, I think CKAs don’t force us to give up
Dougherty and Rysiew (2009) think Lewis is right in saying that (1) captures the commitments of
fallibilism. They think that (1) is pragmatically inappropriate, but not semantically defective. Stanley
(2005) thinks Lewis is right in saying that (1) is contradictory, but claims that Lewis is wrong about
the fallibilist’s commitments. Stanley thinks fallibilists do not have to say that CKAs can express
true propositions. I think there are problems with both defenses of fallibilism. After arguing that
neither defense succeeds, I’ll offer a sketch of a defense that should avoid the difficulties that arise
for these views.

TWO DEFENSES OF FALLIBILISM

According to Rysiew (2001), fallibilists should say that CKAs can express true propositions. The
reason (1) sounds contradictory, he says, is not that it’s semantically defective but that it’s
pragmatically inappropriate to assert (1). He says that in ordinary speech, ‘It might be that ~p’
pragmatically imparts that the speaker does not know that p is true (2001: 493). Thus, the speaker
who asserts (1) pragmatically imparts that she knows something she claims she does not know.
Rysiew is right on this point. (1) is pragmatically inappropriate. Consider:
(2) Harry is a zebra, but it might be that Harry is just a
painted mule.
This sounds contradictory. However, we know that (2) could express a true proposition. Suppose
the speaker did not know that Harry was not a cleverly painted mule but Harry was in fact a zebra.
Given some standard assumptions about epistemic modals, (2) would express a true proposition
under these conditions. Whatever account we give to explain why (2) is pragmatically
inappropriate should predict that (1) is (at least) pragmatically inappropriate.
Rysiew gave the fallibilists what they wanted (i.e., an explanation as to why (1) seems
contradictory that does not entail that (1) is a contradiction), but Stanley (2005) argues that he did
not give them what they needed. Rysiew didn’t explain how (1) could express a true proposition
because he offered no semantic account of epistemic possibility statements. The problem was not

fallibilism or invariantism about knowledge and evidence ascription to avoid skepticism. Still, there
are contextualist views worth considering that won’t be considered here because they are outside
the scope of this paper. One view that I think is attractive combines invariantism about knowledge
ascriptions with contextualism about epistemic possibility statements. This view is a possibility if,
as I shall argue, there’s more to epistemic necessity than just knowledge. I think the view would do
a nice job accommodating some of the data presented below and would undercut some arguments
for contextualism about knowledge attribution.
just that the account was incomplete. As Stanley noted, given a standard account of epistemic
possibility statements, Rysiew’s defense of fallibilism failed. Consider:
(EPk) p is epistemically possible for S iff ~p isn’t obviously
entailed by something S knows.
If open epistemic possibilities are due to ignorance, (1) entails:
(3) I know that Harry is a zebra, but I do not know that Harry
is not just a cleverly disguised mule.
Assuming the speaker is not exceptionally dim, it seems (3) couldn’t be true. It follows from (~3)
and (EPk) that (1) is false.
Stanley did not think that the difficulties facing fallibilism were nearly as serious as Lewis
did. Rather than try to explain how (1) could express a true proposition, he argued that the
fallibilist does not have to say that (1) could express a true proposition.3 Remember that the
fallibilist says that it doesn’t follow from the fact that S knows p that S’s evidence for believing p
entails that p is true. Unless there is an entailment from (1) to (~4), the fallibilist could deny (1)
and say that their view is properly expressed as follows:
(4) I know that Harry is a zebra, but my evidence for
believing that Harry is a zebra does not logically entail
that Harry is not a painted mule.
To my ears, (4) doesn’t sound the slightest bit odd.4
Dougherty and Rysiew (2009) have responded to Stanley’s criticism of Rysiew’s (2001)
defense of fallibilism. They say that the fallibilist has to say that CKAs such as (1) can express true
propositions, so they aren’t satisfied with Stanley’s defense of fallibilism since he concedes to Lewis
that CKAs are contradictory. To meet Stanley’s challenge, they try to explain how (1) could
express a true proposition. To do this, they recommend replacing (EPk) with this:
(EPe) p is epistemically possible for S iff ~p isn’t entailed by S’s
evidence (2009: 127).

3
I think Stanley is right that the fallibilist does not have to say that (1) can express a true
proposition, but I think there are CKAs that fallibilists cannot deny do express true propositions.
4
Note that even if a subject’s evidence consists of all and only the propositions the subject knows, it
doesn’t follow from the fact that a subject knows p that the subject’s evidence for believing p entails
p. Williamson need not deny (4).
The thought is that by replacing (EPk) with (EPe) they can say that there is no entailment from (1)
to (3). Thus, they can agree that (3) is false but insist that (1) is true.
I don’t think that they’ve met Stanley’s challenge. They’ve only pushed the problem back
a step. There is nothing wrong with their explanation as to why we should not assert (1), but they
need to sever the connection between (1) and (3) and they can do this only if (EPe) is a viable
alternative to (EPk). I’m not convinced that (EPe) is viable or a real alternative.
The first problem is with (EPe) itself. Dougherty and Rysiew want to replace (EPk) with
(EPe), but, ‘It must be that p’ is true only if p is true. That is to say, ‘must’ is factive.5 If you
accept (EPk), it is obvious how you would account for the factivity of ‘must’. A speaker truthfully
asserts, ‘It must be the case that p’ only if the speaker knows p. (Perhaps ‘It must be that p’ says
more than just that the speaker knows p, but it seems to entail that p is the case.) The factivity of
‘must’ is explained in terms of the factivity of ‘knows’.6 Dougherty and Rysiew say that p can be
epistemically necessary for S even if S does not know p. Given that they deny that knowledge is
necessary for epistemic necessity, it is far from obvious how they will account for the factivity of
‘must’ or epistemic necessity. At a minimum, they would have to show that the falsity of a
proposition is sufficient for excluding that proposition from a subject’s evidence.7

5
Hawthorne (2004: 28) claims that ‘must’ is factive.
6
Suppose the speaker asserts, ‘Cooper has been looking for clues for hours. He must have found
something by now’, it does seem that the speaker imparts something about the evidential basis of
the belief Cooper has found a clue. Even if ‘must’ involves some sort of evidential meaning
component, it could still be the means by which we express that some proposition is epistemically
necessary for us (i.e., that its falsity is ruled out by our evidence or something we know). See
Fintel and Gillies (2007) who offer us this example. I know that the ball is in one of three boxes. If
I look and see that it is not in the first and then look to discover that it is not in the second, my
assertion ‘The ball must be in the third box’ does not assert something logically weaker than the
bare assertion ‘The ball is in the third box’, but it does indicate something about the inferential
nature of the belief that the ball is in the third box.
7
If they say that there are no false propositions included in someone’s evidence, we’ll see that they
face additional difficulties having to do with evidence ascription and proper concession. Whereas
concession is ‘cheap’, denying that someone has evidence is not nearly so cheap. It isn’t hard to
create a context in which someone might (properly) concede ‘It might be that there are no hands’
but it seems that in such contexts we can still say that among the propositions included in
someone’s evidence is that they have hands. If the proposition I have hands is included in the
speaker’s evidence, it seems that if the speaker says ‘It might be that there are no hands’, the
speaker says something false on their account. What they have to do to avoid this problem is
retreat and say that propositions such as the proposition that I have hands cannot be included in
someone’s evidence. I’ll say more about why I think this is a bad move below.
 The second problem with their proposal is that you can sever the connection between (1)
and (3) by replacing (EPk) with (EPe) only if facts about an individual’s evidence are not
constrained by facts about what that individual knows. Suppose, for example, that you agree with
Williamson (2000) and identify a subject’s evidence with that subject’s knowledge:
(E=K) S’s evidence includes p iff S knows p.
(EPe), (E=K), and (~3), entail (~1). If CKAs can express true propositions, we have to give up
one of these claims.
To their credit, Dougherty and Rysiew (2009: 127, n. 5) acknowledge that their solution
works only if we deny (E=K), but I don’t think they appreciate the severity of the problem they
face. Bracketing the difficult question as to whether or not evidence is propositional, there do seem
to be some plausible objections to (E=K). Consider two. First, (E=K) implies that if one subject
knows p but some other subject fails to know p for purely Gettierish reasons we can say that p is
part of the first subject’s evidence but not the second no matter how similar these subjects and their
epistemic situations might otherwise be. That seems counterintuitive. It seems that if we send two
subjects on drives through the country on subsequent days showing the first real barns and showing
the second some real barns and some fakes, it seems the first might know she’s seen a barn while
the second might believe that she’s seen a barn on essentially the same grounds. We might
stipulate that all of their beliefs are true and experiences are veridical. I just don’t see that the
second subject lacks evidence the first has. It seems that some explanations as to why some
subject’s belief is Gettiered when some very similar subject’s belief is not will appeal to extra-
evidential considerations. Second, (E=K) implies that we can acquire new evidence by means of
competent deduction.8 While it seems that competent deduction allows us to extend our
knowledge and transmit old justification to support new beliefs, it doesn’t seem implausible to
suggest that it does this without enabling the subject to acquire new evidence in the process (e.g., it
seems implausible to think that extending our knowledge to include the deductive consequences of
propositions known on the basis of inductive inference the deductive consequences of propositions
known on the basis of induction thereby become part of our evidence).

8
Bird (2004) defends the idea that there can be inferential evidence. It suffices for my point that
there are cases where S can come to know p via inference without p thereby getting into S’s
evidence. If, however, the reader is disinclined to revise (E=K) in the way I’m suggesting, this is
bad news for Dougherty and Rysiew because that means they could not say both that we have
knowledge of the external world and that such knowledge figures in the formulation of a CKA.
 These objections might give us good reason to reject (E=K), but they are perfectly
consistent with the claim that immediate or non-inferential knowledge of some proposition’s truth
suffices for that proposition’s inclusion in your evidence:
(IKSE) If S has non-inferential knowledge that p is the case, p is
included in S’s evidence.9
I think (IKSE) is attractive. It avoids the difficulties that we saw arise for (E=K) and it seems
intuitive. Those who reject (IKSE) have to show that someone could know p non-inferentially and
still not overcome whatever obstacles stand in our way when we try to acquire new evidence. If
we think of a subject’s evidence as consisting of things the subject can properly treat as reasons for
belief, denying (IKSE) amounts to denying that someone can properly treat that which they know
without inference as a reason for believing further things.10 On the assumption that S knows p only
if S justifiably believes p, (IJSE) entails (IKSE).
(IJSE) If S is non-inferentially justified in believing p, p is part of
S’s evidence.
Like (IKSE), I think (IJSE) is rather attractive. Again, given the gloss on evidence above, those who
deny (IKSE) and so deny (IJSE) have to say that it can be epistemically improper for you to treat p as
a reason for believing further things even if they concede that you’re epistemically justified in
believing p.
To see why (IKSE) and (IJSE) creates difficulties for Dougherty and Rysiew, let p be the
proposition that S has hands. Suppose S believes this, in part, because of her veridical experiences
of her hands. Suppose that S’s friend asks her to consider various skeptical scenarios. It seems she
could speak truthfully by saying, ‘It might be that there are no hands, only hand appearances’. If S
could truthfully say ‘It might be that there are no hands’, it follows from (EPe) that her evidence
does not include the proposition that she has hands. It follows from the fact that this proposition is
not included in her evidence and (IKSE) that she cannot know non-inferentially that she has hands.
According to (IJSE), would also have to deny that she can be justified non-inferentially in believing
that she has hands if we said this. I’d prefer to retain (IKSE) and (IJSE) if possible and I’d prefer not

9
For the purposes of this discussion, we don’t need an account of evidence. Any account of
evidence that incorporates (IKSE) will cause problems for Dougherty and Rysiew. This is not the
place to defend the account, but my own preference is for the following view: p is part of S’s
evidence iff p is the case and S is non-inferentially justified in believing that p is the case.
10
If you think of evidence as something like a reason you have to rely on in trying to justify further
beliefs, you shouldn’t deny (IKSE). It seems odd to deny (IKSE) even if you deny this.
to be forced to say that the scope of non-inferential knowledge and justification is so limited that it
excludes propositions about the external world.11 I think Maher’s (1996) suggestion that external
world propositions known immediately by observation is included in your evidence is an attractive
one. We’ll see below that to accommodate some data about proper concession, we’ll see that
Dougherty and Rysiew’s fallibilist has to deny this view as well as deny (IKSE) and (IJSE) if this
fallibilist is going to say that the scope of non-inferential knowledge is broad enough to encompass
direct knowledge of the external world.
Essentially the same problem arises for Stanley. Recall that Stanley’s fallibilist thinks that
CKAs such as (1) do not express true propositions. He does think that (4) is true. Consider two
propositions: (i) that S has hands; (ii) that there is at least one hand. It seems that having
entertained the possibility that she might be hallucinating, S might properly say, ‘It might be that
there are no hands, only hand appearances’. If that were to express a true proposition, it follows
from this that Stanley’s fallibilist would have to concede that she has no evidence that would
obviously entail that there is at least one hand. This, in turn, suggests that Stanley’s fallibilist would
concede that her evidence does not include the proposition that she has hands. It follows from this
concession and (IKSE) that Stanley’s fallibilist cannot claim to have non-inferential knowledge that
she has hands. It follows from (IJSE) that Stanley’s fallibilist cannot claim to have non-inferential
justification that she has hands.
In brief, the problem is this. It seems that for any proposition, p, such that p is a
proposition about the external world (i.e., one whose truth-value isn’t determined solely by facts
about a subject’s non-factive mental state), the introduction of a skeptical hypothesis into discussion
can make it proper for a subject that we would otherwise credit with non-inferential knowledge
that p to concede that it might be that p is mistaken. On Dougherty and Rysiew’s view as well as
Stanley’s view, we have to say that such a subject’s concession is proper only if this subject has no
evidence that obviously entails that this proposition is true. Barring any contextualist maneuvering

11
As an anonymous referee noted, not everyone holds the view that our knowledge of the external
world is non-inferential. That is true and I do not wish to say here that this sort of view is
mistaken. Many contemporary foundationalists (e.g., Feldman (2004) and Pryor (2000)) are
willing to say that our evidence includes propositions pertaining to things external to us (e.g.,
propositions ascribing shape and color properties to objects that are the semantic values of
perceptual demonstratives) and my point is only that it would be better if we had an account of
epistemic possibility and necessity that did not force us to abandon such views in favor of a more
classical foundationalism that takes our evidence to consist of propositions having to do with sense-
data.
on their part about evidence ascription, this forces them to adopt the view that we cannot have
these propositions about the external world as part of our evidence.12 Either they have to say that
such propositions cannot be known non-inferentially because some sort of classical foundationalism
is true or that we cannot know such external world propositions non-inferentially because the
skeptic is right. Myself, I think that we know lots about the external world non-inferentially, our
evidence includes loads of propositions about the external world (e.g., propositions we know non-
inferentially to be true on the basis of veridical experience taken at face value), and we shouldn’t be
forced to retract either of these claims just because it is easy to get concessions out of us. I think
the fallibilists might reasonably worry that the defenses offered thus far on their behalf concede too
much to accommodate intuitions about proper concession of possible error.

A REPAIR

Where do we go from here? A promising strategy for the fallibilist is to revise (EPk) as follows:
(EPc) p is epistemically possible for S iff ~p isn’t obviously
entailed by something S knows with certainty.13
According to (EPc), S’s concession, ‘It might be that ~p’, is an acknowledgement that she either
doesn’t know p or that p isn’t certain. If we replace (EPk) with (EPc), we can deal with the
problem that arose for Dougherty and Rysiew’s account. To sever the connection between (1) and
(3) and explain how (1) could express a true proposition, they had to say that it is harder to acquire

12
An anonymous referee asked whether a contextualist view about evidence ascription might avoid
these worries and I think that this contextualist view could avoid these worries. I don’t have any
problem with such a contextualist view, but I don’t think it’s needed to deal with the problems that
arise for Dougherty and Rysiew or the problems that arise for Stanley.
13
We can distinguish statements of personal certainty (‘I’m certain that p’) from statements of
impersonal certainty (‘p is certain’) where the former seems to be about the kind of confidence S
has and the second has to do with the strength of the speaker’s epistemic position. I’m assuming
that both kinds of certainty are relevant to assessing statements about epistemic possibility. DeRose
claims that (1998: 69) that ‘It is certain that p’ is the dual of ‘It’s possible that p’ and suggests that
knowledge requires both kinds of certainty (2009: 186). I don’t think he’d be opposed to (EPc)
because my guess is that he’d not see much difference between (EPk) and (EPc). An argument of
Stanley’s (2008) discussed below suggests that certainty isn’t required for knowledge. Below, I try
to show that we can build on Stanley’s observations to motivate (EPc). Stanley is sympathetic to a
contextualist treatment of ‘certain’. Combine his contextualist account of ‘certain’ with (EPc) and
deny (EPk), and we can concede to the contextualists that contextualism about epistemic possibility
statements is correct while remaining agnostic with respect to their claims about knowledge
attribution. In this way, we can try to undercut some arguments for contextualism about ‘knows’.
evidence than it is to acquire immediate or non-inferential knowledge. This is a problem for those
of us who think that nothing beyond non-inferential knowledge of p’s truth is needed for p’s
inclusion in our evidence. Instead, we can say that more is required for epistemic necessity than is
required for knowledge. Thus, less is required for open epistemic possibilities than ignorance or the
lack of entailing evidence.14 If more is required for epistemic necessity than knowledge, CKAs
aren’t a problem for fallibilist. If p is epistemically possible for S if either S doesn’t know p or X,
the intuition that S is proper to concede ‘It might be that ~p’ only commits us to saying that either
S doesn’t know p or X. I think a plausible candidate for ‘X’ is certainty, but the strategy requires
only identifying some condition that is not a necessary condition for knowledge that is a plausible
necessary condition for epistemic necessity.
We have good reason to think that (EPk) is really only a first approximation towards an
account of epistemic possibility. First, think about cases of inductive knowledge. It seems odd to
think that you only have knowledge of future events when it is not epistemically possible that these
events do not occur. Myself, I don’t doubt that our beliefs about the future constitute knowledge. I
doubt that it would be correct to say that it isn’t epistemically possible that these beliefs are
mistaken.
Second, think about conversations where skeptical hypotheses are introduced. In such
contexts, it seems proper to concede that we might be mistaken in just about any belief about the
external world. Now, suppose that knowledge is necessary for warranted assertion and that
concessions (e.g., ‘It might be that I’m a BIV’) are really assertions. It seems that given these
assumptions and (EPk), the propriety of the concession would depend upon whether the speaker
knew herself to be ignorant. But, it seems harder to know that you don’t know than it is to know
that it’s proper to concede that you might be mistaken. Given (EPk), to assert knowingly that you
might be mistaken, you either know that you don’t believe p, that your belief about p is mistaken,
that the justification you have for your belief is insufficient, or that you are in some sort of Gettier
case. I doubt that you know one of these to be true whenever you know that it’s proper to concede
that you might be mistaken. Thus, you either should think that concessions aren’t really assertions,
deny that knowledge is the norm of assertion, or say (as I do) that in conceding that you might be
mistaken you might only be conceding that you are not completely certain.

14
This allows us to keep our (IKSE) and (IJSE) while recognizing that a subject could properly
concede that pretty much any belief about the external world is a belief she might be mistaken in
holding.
 Third, consider the contrast between (1) embedded and similar embedded statements:
(5) I believe that I know that Harry is a zebra, but it might be
that Harry is just a painted mule.
(6) I believe that I know that Harry is a zebra, but he isn’t.
(7) I believe that I know that Harry is a zebra, but there’s no
reason for me to believe that he is.
(8) I believe that I know that Harry is a zebra, but I don’t
believe that Harry is a zebra.
If after seeing the zebra you raise the possibility that the zookeepers painted a mule and put it in the
zebra cage, it seems that I could speak truthfully if I utter (5). When we embed these other claims
where the second conjunct denies that a condition necessary for knowledge obtains, the embedding
doesn’t seem to wash away the sin of asserting (6), (7), or (8). If we take the effect of embedding
these claims to be that the speaker thinks that it is not altogether unlikely that the embedded claims
are true, the fact that we find (5) to be acceptable is some indication that the defectiveness of CKAs
is not due to the fact that they express obvious falsehoods but rather something else. Given that we
know that (1) is at least pragmatically defective, we can help ourselves to whatever pragmatic
explanation strikes us as promising as to why (1) shouldn’t be asserted.15
Fourth, consider the sort of cases that led Radford (1966) to say that knowledge doesn’t
require belief. Pressed for answers on a quiz show, a contestant consistently gives the right answers
and is pleasantly surprised to discover that the answers she’s giving are correct. It seems that as
she’s doing this she might rightly think to herself that she might be mistaken while someone at
home might be right to say that she knew the answers to the questions. I think one lesson from
such cases is this. Whereas it is relatively easy to get yourself in a position to properly concede, ‘It
might be that ~p’, it is relatively harder to get yourself into a position to properly assert that you
don’t know that p. This would be puzzling if (EPk) were true, but to be expected if (EPc) is true.
Here is a fifth and final piece of evidence to consider. As Stanley notes, redundant
conjunctions provide evidence for entailment.16 When there is an obvious entailment between two

15
Dougherty and Rysiew (2009: 129) suggest that when you say, ‘It might be that ~p’ you
pragmatically imply that there are genuine reasons for doubt that make it inappropriate to self-
ascribe knowledge.
16
Stanley (2008: 38).
propositions, it will seem odd to follow an assertion of one by one obviously entailed by the first.
Consider:
(9) I know that Bill came to the party. In fact, he did.
(10) I know that Bill came to the party. Indeed, I have good reason to
think he did.
(11) I know that Bill came to the party. Not only that, I believe he
came to the party.
Contrast these with:
(12) I know that Bill came to the party. In fact, I’m certain that he did.
Whereas (9)-(11) seem odd, (12) does not. Stanley’s hypothesis is that ascriptions of knowledge
entail ascriptions of beliefs, good reasons, and claims about the truth of propositions said to be
known whereas an ascription of knowledge merely pragmatically imparts that the knower is certain
of the truth of what is known. The evidence is that entailments cannot be reinforced, but we can
reinforce information that is pragmatically imparted.17 Of course, if knowledge doesn’t require
certainty, that won’t be news to most of us.
Now, consider:
(13) Bill must have come to the party. In fact, I’m certain that he did.
(14) Bill must have come to the party. In fact, it is certain that he did.
(15) It is certain that Bill was at the party. Indeed, Bill must have been
there.
These seem redundant in the way that (9)-(11) are. If they are, then there are obvious entailments
between ‘must’ and ‘certain’. As there is no obvious entailment from ‘knows’ to ‘certain’, there is
no obvious entailment from ‘knows’ to ‘must’. The absence of evidence of an entailment is not
particularly strong evidence of the absence of an entailment. It is suggestive, however. Why is it
that we don’t find the evidence for the entailment from ‘knows’ to ‘must’? Isn’t this precisely
where we would expect to find it?
There are two objections to (EPc) to consider.18 Suppose a military instructor gives this
advice to soldiers in training:
(16) Before you walk into an area where there are lots of high trees, if

17
Stanley (2008: 38). He credits this point to Sadock (1978).
18
I owe both of these objections to an anonymous referee.
 there might be snipers hiding in the branches use your
flamethrowers to clear away the foliage.19
Perhaps the objection is that it is not plausible to suggest that these soldiers are being advised to fire
if they don’t know with certainty that the enemy is not hiding in the foliage. If that’s the worry, I’ll
dig in and say that I don’t think it’s implausible. Suppose Brown didn’t use his flamethrower to
clear away the foliage and a sniper picked off a member of his platoon. I can easily imagine a
commanding officer chastising him by saying that he should have fired into the foliage since he
wasn’t certain that there weren’t snipers hidden there. Now, suppose there wasn’t a sniper. If
Brown hadn’t fired, I can imagine a commanding officer asking him why he didn’t use his
flamethrower if he wasn’t certain that there wasn’t a sniper hidden in the foliage. I can imagine
Brown trying to defend himself by saying that he had good reason to think that there were no
enemies in the foliage and adding that there turned out to be none hidden there. I can imagine his
commanding officer saying that this was neither here nor there because he wasn’t sure that there
weren’t snipers hidden in the foliage. If he later said to his mates that he knew that there was no
one there, I can imagine them saying that that was neither here nor there because they were told to
fire unless they were certain and that he knows he wasn’t certain at the time.
There is another aspect of this example that calls for comment. I’ve suggested that there’s
some evidence that supports the hypothesis that epistemic necessity should be understood in terms
of what’s known with certainty rather than simply in terms of what’s known. Because the focus has
been on CKAs, I didn’t have to worry about cases that suggest that the proper assessment of a claim
involving an epistemic modal can depend upon the epistemic position of groups of individuals. As
formulated, (EPe) says that if we’re talking about what’s epistemically possible for S, we should
focus on S’s evidence, (EPk) says that we should focus on what S knows, and (EPc) says that we
should focus on what S knows with certainty. This case suggests these views each need refinement.
If the instructor happened to know with certainty that there wasn’t a sniper in some tree and the
soldier had no idea whether there was a sniper in the trees, surely the instructor intended to convey
that the soldier ought to fire into the trees. The instructor’s epistemic state is not what matters for
assessing (16) and so we need to modify our account of epistemic possibility accordingly. One way
to do this is to understand epistemic possibility relative to the epistemic positions of members of
some contextually determined group and relative to contextually salient ways of settling some

19
Example taken from Egan, Hawthorne, and Weatherson (2005).
question:
(EPc*) S’s assertion, ‘It is possible that p’ is true iff (i) no member of the
contextually determined group knows for certain something that
entails ~p in a way that is obvious and (ii) there is no relevant way
that members of this group to remedy this.20
The example above suggests that the group needn’t involve the speaker and (EPc*) seems to handle
the case nicely.
This sort of view might help us make sense of the case above, but it is thought to have
trouble handling cases like this one.21 A captain says to his crew at noon:
(17) The treasure might be right underneath us.
After hours of dives that turned up nothing, the captain checks his charts again and discovers that
his ship is not where he had intended it to be when he used those charts to plot their course this
morning. He sees that the map says that the treasure is miles from their current location. The
captain then says:
(18) I was mistaken, the treasure isn’t here.
The problem that this case presents for (EPe), (EPk), and (EPc) is this. If the captain speaks
correctly in asserting (18), it’s natural to take this as asserting that (17) is false. If (17) is false and
it’s false that it’s epistemically possible (for the captain) that the treasure is beneath them, then it’s
epistemically necessary that it’s not beneath them. I don’t think we want to say that the captain’s
evidence entailed that the treasure was elsewhere or that the captain knew that the treasure was
elsewhere. To deal with this case, we could put clause (ii) from (EPc*) to work, but it seems to
be an inessential feature of the case that there was something available that could have shown them
that the treasure wasn’t where they were looking for it. You get similar problems if we imagine a
stowaway hiding in a barrel who knows where the treasure is, knows that the ship is nowhere near
it, and hears the captain assert (17). Our stowaway mutters to himself:

20
Essentially, this is DeRose’s (1991: 594) view with a slight twist. He talks about what’s known,
I’ve shifted to talking about what’s known with certainty.
21
The example is taken from Hacking (1967). In discussing this case, DeRose (1991: 587) thinks
that the captain says something false if the captain says that it is possible that we will find the
treasure here, but notes that he doesn’t think that this judgment is “obviously correct”. Like
DeRose, my intuitions about this case are not that clear. I’m a bit more inclined to think that the
captain’s judgment was mistaken if the captain says ‘It is possible that we shall find the treasure
here’ (the wording of the original example), but less certain what to say when we use ‘might’ in
place of ‘possible’.
 (19) He’s wrong. The treasure is nowhere near here.
That seems right.22 Our stowaway isn’t a way for the relevant group to determine the location of
the treasure. Our stowaway also doesn’t seem to be a member of any contextually determined
group. So, clause (i) in (EPc*) does some work in the sniper case, but it doesn’t seem to do much
work in this case.
There are two strategies for dealing with the stowaway. First, we could go relativist.23 On
one version of the relativist view, ‘It might be the case that p’ is true relative to a centered world
<w, t, i> iff it is compatible with everything that is within i’s epistemic reach at t in w that p. Let
‘p’ be the proposition that the treasure is beneath the ship. At the time of (17)’s utterance, p was
compatible with everything within the relevant individual’s epistemic reach (i.e., the captain’s
epistemic reach initially) but at the time of (18)’s utterance, p was not compatible with everything
within the relevant individual’s epistemic reach (i.e., the captain’s epistemic reach at the later
time). At the time of (17)’s utterance, p was not compatible with everything within the relevant
individual’s epistemic reach (i.e., the stowaway). Our relativist makes use of the notion of
‘epistemic reach’ and that can be cashed out in different ways (i.e., what the individual is in a
position to know, what’s consistent with that individual’s evidence, what the individual can know
for certain). In arguing that (EPc) is preferable to (EPk), I’ve already explained why I think this
notion of ‘epistemic reach’ is better understood in terms of what’s known for certain rather than
just what’s known.
Second, it’s possible to handle this case with something less exotic than relativism. It’s
hard to resist the relativist view if we’re operating under the assumption that the propriety of (18)
and (19) is due to the fact that the captain spoke falsely in uttering (17). An alternative construal of
what’s happening is that the speakers who assert (18) and (19) are negating the prejacent (i.e., that
the treasure is right beneath the ship) rather than asserting the negation of (17).24 If that’s what is
happening in this case, we don’t need to move to the relativist view. We can see that (EPc*)
already has the resources for dealing with it. The question as to whether we should prefer (EPc*)
to some alternative relativist view is a difficult one that I think needn’t be settled here. For
whichever view we prefer, we’ll need to say something about what epistemic reach amounts to or

22
Our stowaway is an eavesdropper.
23
For development and defense of the view, see Egan (2007).
24
See von Fintel and Gillies (Forthcoming) who suggest that this is one way to deal with
eavesdroppers without having to adopt the relativist framework.
which aspect of a relevant group’s epistemic position matters to assessing a statement about
epistemic possibility. The success of the argument that purports to show that there’s more to
epistemic necessity than just knowledge doesn’t depend upon taking a position in this debate
between the relativist and the relativist’s critics. To neutralize the threat CKAs pose to fallibilism,
all we have to show is that there’s more to epistemic necessity than just knowledge and we can
show that this is so even if the debate between the relativist and the relativist’s critics continues.

CONCLUSION

The fallibilist should occupy a middle ground between Stanley’s view and Dougherty and Rysiew’s
view. Stanley is right that the fallibilist doesn’t have to say that CKAs of the form ‘I know p, but it
might be that ~p’ could express true propositions when the subject doesn’t have evidence that
entails, inter alia, that p is the case. However, as there are cases where it seems that we have such
evidence (e.g., where one sees that one has hands and infers that there is at least one hand) where it
also seems appropriate to concede that one might be mistaken anyway (e.g., where one considers
skeptical hypotheses). So, I think he’s mistaken when he says that CKAs like (1) never express true
propositions and mistaken when he says that this is the line that the fallibilist must take. Dougherty
and Rysiew are right that the fallibilist isn’t necessarily contradicting herself when she says, ‘I know
p but it might be that ~p’ but they are wrong to suggest that the fallibilist would be contradicting
herself if she possessed evidence that entailed p. They can only say that it is proper to concede the
possibility of error in a wide range of circumstances by saying that we have far less evidence than
we antecedently would have thought. We need to revise (EPk) to say that more is required for
epistemic necessity than knowledge. Maybe (EPc) or (EPc*) doesn’t get every case right, but it’s a
step towards a view that hopefully does. Simply by making a move towards that view and away
from (EPk) and (EPe), we can see that CKAs are not a serious problem for fallibilists.

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