Eavesdropping: What is it good for?

Abstract

Judgments about truth, retraction, and consistency across contexts have been used in recent years to argue both for and against the revisionary theses of relativism about truth and expressivism about apparently truth-apt expressions like epistemic modals. We show that we find the same patterns that have been observed for epistemic modal claims like Might p when it comes to first-person attitude claims with the form I think that p . This poses a serious challenge to many extant accounts of eavesdropping judgments-whether relativist, expressivist, or contextualist in nature-because extending these treatments to the corresponding 'thinks' judgments is prima facie implausible. Moreover, we argue, it suggests that eavesdropping judgments will not play an essential role in deciding between these views.

The conjunction fallacy: confirmation or relevance?

“…Indeed, in addition to helping explain other reasoning fallacies, the notion of conversational relevance may play a role in a variety of other contexts in psychology, linguistics, and philosophy: compare existing work on explaining judgments about conditionals(Lassiter, 2023;Lassiter & Li, 2024;Over, 2023;Over & Evans, 2024) as well as a variety of patterns involving truth-value judgments, where manipulation of the question under discussion has been shown to influence truth-value judgments(Beddor & Egan, 2018;Kroll & Rysling, 2019;Phillips & Mandelkern, 2020).12 A different, intriguing possibility, suggested to us by an anonymous reviewer for this journal, would be to incorporate relevance into an averaging model of the conjunction fallacy.…”

An objection to the modal account of risk

“…If that's a sensible thing for B to say -and it would seem to be at first blush -then it puts some pressure on the claim that A's and B's judgments are both true. This is analogous to the so-called 'eavesdropper' cases that have bedevilled the literature on epistemic modals (see, for instance, Egan, Hawthorne and Weatherson, 2005, Hawthorne, 2007, von Fintel and Gillies, 2008, MacFarlane, 2011, Phillips and Mandelkern, 2020. To take a familiar example, suppose Holmes and Watson are at Baker St using a wire to listen in on a conversation between Moriarty and his underlings.…”