Declaratives, Questioning, Defeasibility

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Nick Enfield for many insightful suggestions on earlier versions of this commentary.

Notes

¹ Kamio (1997) developed a systematic account of epistemics working within a framework based in the theory of speech acts.

²In “The Well-Informed Citizen: An Essay on the Social Distribution of Knowledge,” Schütz (1964) suggested that “if we had to draw a map depicting” the distribution of knowledge in society,

… it would not resemble a political map showing the various countries with their well-established frontiers but rather a topographical map representing the shape of a mountain range in the customary way by contour lines connecting points of equal altitude. Peaks and valleys, foothills and slopes, are spread over the map in infinitely diversified configurations.

³The case exhibits some similarities to the one Sacks (1995) discussed in the lecture titled, “Poetics; Requests, Offers, and Threats; The ‘Old Man’ as an Evolved Natural Object.”

⁴As Nick Enfield notes, it is unlikely that Berkoff actually thinks this. Rather, he's being facetious. Be that as it may, his talk implies that he believes it, and it is this believe-structure (i.e., what Berkoff believes Razer believes Berkoff knows) that underwrites his utterance.