THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL CHALLENGES TO RETRACTION
June 23-24, 2021
Online
University of Warsaw
DESCRITPION
Retraction (the act of "taking back" a previous assertion due to, e.g., a change in perspective) has been appealed to in the debate between contextualism and relativism about "perspectival expressions" (predicates of taste, epistemic modals, aesthetic adjectives, moral terms, epistemic vocabulary etc.). This phenomenon has been taken to favor relativism (at least in one of its forms) over its rivals. Recently, various challenges to using retraction data to support relativism have surfaced in the literature, of both a theoretical and an empirical nature. This workshop focuses on assessing these challenges, presenting new ones, and ascertaining whether relativism can answer them, as well as on surveying extant experimental studies and showcasing novel ones. Among the main questions tackled by the presentations at the workshop are the following:
- What are the best theoretical arguments in favor of and against using retraction to support relativism?
- Is retraction mandatory? Under which conditions?
- Is relativism committed to taking retraction as being mandatory?
- What are the linguistics markers of retraction?
- How robust is the phenomenon of retraction?
- What exactly do the experimental studies on retraction show vis-à-vis the contextualism/relativism debate?
- What can approaches within frameworks like speech act theory tell us about retraction? Etc.
ORGANIZATION
The workshop is part of the project Semantic Relativism about Perspectival Expressions: A Reassessment and Defense
(OPUS 17 project no. 2019/33/B/HS1/01269) and is organized by Dan Zeman, with the support of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Warsaw. Please write to danczeman[at]gmail.com if you want to participate.
PROGRAM
(All times are in CEST)
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 23
9.45: Welcome
10.00-11.15: Teresa Marques (University of Barcelona), "How Expressives Enact Norms in Conversation, and How to Retract Them"
11.30-12.45: Andrei Mărășoiu (University of Bucharest), "'I never said that!' – What Is Plausible Deniability?"
Lunch
14.00-15.15: Laura Caponetto (Vita-Salute San Raffaele University), "'Actually, Scratch That': A Tour into the Illocutionary Fabric of Retraction"
15.30-16.45: Leïla Bussière-Caraes (University of Amsterdam), "Retraction and Common Ground"
17.00-18.15: Filippo Ferrari (University of Padua), "Mental Retraction?"
THURSDAY, JUNE 24
10.00-11.15: Jeremy Wyatt & Joseph Ulatowski (University of Waikato), "Testing Taste Talk: Retraction and Beyond"
11.30-12.45: Markus Kneer (University of Zurich), "Norms of Retraction: Myth and Reality"
Lunch
14.00-15.15: James Beebe (University at Buffalo), "The Realism of Contextualism versus the Antirealism of Relativism"
15.30-16.45: Joshua Knobe (Yale University), "Proposition or Update? Two Accounts of Retraction"
17.00-18.15: Niels Skovgaard-Olsen (Georg-August University Göttingen), "Norm Conflicts and Epistemic Modals"
ABSTRACTS
James Beebe (University of New York at Buffalo): "The Realism of Contextualism versus the Antirealism of Relativism"
I argue that the alleged advantages that assessor-centered relativism has over contextualism in accounting for cases of retraction are outweighed by the strong form of antirealism regarding knowledge relations or moral properties that relativism entails. According to relativism, whether someone stands in a knowledge relation to a proposition or whether an action has certain moral properties is something that is in the eye of the (assessing) beholder, whereas on contextualism this is not the case. Because relativism and contextualism both relativize important features of knowledge attributions and denials and moral judgments to particular kinds of subjects (assessors or attributors), this significant difference between the two views is often not appreciated. In domains such as epistemology and ethics where it seems that the relevant (epistemological and ethical) facts should not be strongly mind-dependent, I argue that whatever benefits the relativist explanation of retraction brings with it are outweighed by the cost of its antirealism.
Leïla Bussière-Caraes (University of Amsterdam): "Retraction and Common Ground"
Retraction is the speech act whereby one undoes the effect of a previous utterance in a conversation. But how does that work? We argue that retractions should be understood as proposals to update the common ground in a certain way. In this regard, retractions are no different from other typical speech acts, although they target another speech act. Qua proposals, retractions only update the common ground if accepted. If rejected, all that is added to the common ground is that a proposal has been made. If the retraction of an utterance is accepted, then the participants go back on the conversational record, find the utterance at stake, remove the update of the common ground it brought about, and then run through subsequent updates if they are compatible. Our account has the resources to reconcile the idea that a retraction undoes a previous speech act with the idea that a retraction cannot completely cancel the conversation that occurred after the speech act.
We conclude by applying the account to a number of problematic cases.
Laura Caponetto (Vita-Salute San Raffaele University): “'Actually, Scratch That': A Tour into the Illocutionary Fabric of Retraction"
Just as we can do things with words, so too we can use words to take back what we did in speaking. Political history is filled with such u-turns. Consider, for example, Nigel Farage’s ‘unresignation’ in May 2015, or Al Gore’s decision to ‘unconcede’ to George W. Bush in 2000. Retraction maneuvers are common currency and play a significant role in our discursive practices, as well as in our social and political lives. Still, very little attention has been paid among speech act theorists to how retraction works. By expanding upon previous work (Caponetto 2020) and engaging with recent contributions to the topic (e.g. Kukla & Steinberg 2021), I here set out to unpack the illocutionary fabric of retraction – i.e. the illocutionary category it belongs to, its felicity conditions, the normative changes it effects. I construe retraction as a second-order exercitive, whose normative function is to rub out the deontic update enacted by some previous illocution. I spell out its general (definitional) felicity conditions, and then pause on the special felicity conditions for retracting specific illocutionary types. I conclude by advancing a tentative principle of non-retractability for expressives, according to which one who attempts to take back the expression of a feeling ends up defeating one’s overall illocutionary performance.
Filippo Ferrari (University of Padua): "Mental Retraction?"
Following John MacFarlane’s lead, the recent debate on retraction has focused on clarifying the nature and normative profile of retraction at the level of speech acts, as well as on what are the consequences of countenancing a speech act of retraction in relation to debates in metasemantics. In this talk I would like to shift the focus from the speech act level to the mental level and explore the following questions: (i) can we make sense of something analogous to retraction at the mental level? (ii) If so, how should we understand normativity at the level of mental acts and attitudes in order to account for the peculiar normative effect that retraction is deemed to have (in contrast with the normative effects associated with mere change of mind and rejection)? (iii) Assuming that we have genuine cases of mental retraction, how does it connect with retraction at the level of speech acts? By relying on a recent taxonomy of mental acts and attitudes developed by Matthew Chrisman, I’ll defend a positive answer to the first question and argue that we can make sense of the idea of retracting an act of judging, understood here as one of the canonical ways of forming a belief. I’ll then sketch a picture of the normativity of mental acts and attitudes in terms of cognitive-normative commitments and show how, with this picture in hand, we can account for at least some aspects of the peculiar normative features associated with the speech act of retraction. I’ll conclude with some tentative remarks concerning the relationships between mental retraction and retraction at the level of speech acts.
Markus Kneer (University of Zurich): "Norms of Retraction: Myth and Reality"
In a series of experiments, I show that it is not difficult to find clear-cut evidence for norms of retraction in several domains. However, there's mounting evidence that the linguistic norms of retraction posited by relativists are a myth and do not pose a challenge to contextualist semantics.
Joshua Knobe (Yale University): "Proposition or Update? Two Accounts of Retraction"
When a speaker makes an assertion, we can distinguish (a) the proposition the speaker asserts and (b) the update she proposes. A question now arises as to which of these is being retracted if the speaker makes a retraction. Thus, suppose the speaker says: "I take that back." Is she thereby saying that she is no longer committed to the truth of the proposition she asserted? Or is she thereby saying that she wants to undo the update she proposed? Drawing on a variety of different sources of evidence, I argue for the latter hypothesis. When a speaker retracts an assertion, she does not necessarily indicate anything about the truth of the proposition asserted. What she does, most directly, is to indicate that she is trying to undo the proposed update.
Teresa Marques (University of Barcelona): "How Expressives Enact Norms in Conversation, and How to Retract Them"
In a recent paper, Marques & García-Carpintero (2020) have characterized the derogatory presuppositional component of slurs in normative terms, and defined derogation with a constitutive norm: one must derogate group G on account of their having features F1… Fn only if group G has F1 … Fn, and contempt fits a group with such features. The meaning of the slur is such that it presupposes the fittingness of contempt, or disgust (or both), towards the target group. Using the slur, and accepting such a use, adds or reinforces this normative requirement as common ground. Other expressivist accounts offer more standard explanations of the presupposition associated with a slur in terms of a proposition that is added to common ground (Schlenker 2007, 2016, Macià 2002, 2014, Cepollaro 2015, Ceppolaro & Stojanovic 2016). This paper aims to test these two broadly different kinds of presuppositional theories against a recent case of a forced retraction of an utterance that is questionably derogatory.
Andrei Mărășoiu (University of Bucharest): “'I never said that!' – What Is Plausible Deniability?
Sometimes, it pays off more to pretend not having said something – or to genuinely point out you didn’t say it, as we shall see – than to admit and retract. Plausible deniability is a natural accompaniment for retraction. But what is plausible deniability? I appeal to a few intuitively imaginable scenarios, borrowed from healthcare ethics and medical humanities. These scenarios are consistent with plausibly deniable derogatory contexts. However, I shall argue that two main conceptions concerning the nature of plausible deniability – proposed by Douglas Walton and, respectively, David Beaver and Jason Stanley – don’t do full justice to these intuitive scenarios. This strongly suggests that we should look for a new and more encompassing view about what plausible deniability might be in full generality. I end by sketching the barest outlines of such a view, and favorably compare it to its competitors.
Niels Skovgaard-Olsen (Georg-August University Göttingen): "Norm Conflicts and Epistemic Modals"
Statements containing epistemic modals (e.g. “by autumn 2021 most European countries may have the Covid-19 pandemic under control”) are common expressions of epistemic uncertainty. In this paper, previous published findings (Knobe & Yalcin, 2014; Khoo & Phillips, 2018) on the opposition between Contextualism and Relativism for epistemic modals are re-examined. It is found that these findings contain a substantial degree of individual variation. To investigate whether participants differ in their interpretation of epistemic modals, an experiment with multiple phases and sessions is used to classify participants according to the three semantic theories of Relativism, Contextualism, and Objectivism. Through this study, some of the first empirical evidence for the kind of truth value shifts postulated by semantic Relativism is presented. It is furthermore found that participants’ disagreement judgments match their truth evaluations and that participants are capable of distinguishing between truth and justification. In a second experimental session, it is investigated whether participants thus classified follow the norm of retraction which Relativism and Objectivism use to account for argumentation with epistemic modals. Here the results are less favorable for Relativism. In a second experiment, these results are replicated and the normative beliefs of participants concerning the norm of retraction are investigated following work on measuring norms by Bicchieri (2017). Again, it is found that on average participants show no strong preferences concerning the norm of retraction for epistemic modals, yet participants who had committed to Objectivism and had training in logics applied the norm of retraction to might-statements. These results present a substantial challenge to the account of argumentation with epistemic modals presented in MacFarlane (2014), as discussed.
Jeremy Wyatt & Joseph Ulatowski (University of Waikato): "Testing Taste Talk: Retraction and Beyond"
It's well known that in attempting to defend his assessment-relativist treatment of predicates of personal taste (PPT), MacFarlane runs into a tricky problem. The problem is that apparently, "we cannot discern any practical difference between semantic theories that posit assessment sensitivity and those that do not, since in the situation where an assertion is being made, the context of use and context of assessment coincide" (MacFarlane 2014, pp. 107-108). The way to solve this problem, MacFarlane argues, is by considering what assessment-relativists and their opponents (especially non-indexical contextualists) should say about the retraction norm that governs our use of PPT.
Markus Kneer has recently offered empirical data concerning ordinary speakers' judgements about retraction and PPT which look to be problematic for MacFarlane's defense of assessment-relativism. In a study that is under development, one of our goals will be to replicate Kneer's findings. However, in designing this study, we have found it necessary to modify Kneer's experimental design. One of our aims in the talk is to explain the modifications that we've made and the rationale behind them. We will also take up a broader question that, we think, needs to be reexamined: how significant are retraction data in debates about PPT, and what other empirical diagnostics should we use in selecting between the available analyses of PPT?