The Southern Journal of Philosophy

Volume 47, Issue 3, Fall 2009

Hagit Benbaji
Pages 225-237

On the Pragmatic Explanation of Concessive Knowledge Attributions

On Lewis’s reading, fallibilism is the contradictory view that it is possible that S knows that p, even though S cannot eliminate some remote scenarios in which not-p. The pragmatic strategy is to make the alleged contradiction a mere pragmatic implicature, which is explained by false conversational expectations. I argue that the pragmatic strategy fails.