How Much is at Stake for the Pragmatic Encroacher

Many people are saying nowadays that what you know partly depends on what practical decisions you face (e.g. Stanley 2005; Fantl and McGrath 2009). This “pragmatic encroachment” thesis usually involves two different ideas. One idea is that knowledge plays a distinctive role in practical reasoning: you can act on what you know. The other idea is that knowledge is harder to achieve when more is at stake. But it isn’t obvious that these two ideas fit together the way that is generally assumed. Charity Anderson and John Hawthorne (ms) have recently argued that when “high stakes” is made precise in some natural ways, situations where more is at stake are not necessarily the ones which make stricter demands on practical decisions—so the two ideas come apart. Of course, their discussion is not conclusive: there are other reasonable ways of trying to sharpen what stakes are, and Anderson and Hawthorne invite others to investigate “to what extent the choice of other sharpenings makes a structural difference”. I doubt their invitation will be ignored. The discovery of unspoiled conceptual territory—close to home, theoretically important, and thus far unanalysed—is too enticing to epistemologists. The usual method for these explorations is to elicit intuitions about particular cases, and then try to fit an account to those intuitions. The danger of this method is that it may lead to an account of stakes that doesn’t do the theoretical work that originally made the notion interesting. So I’ll work in the opposite direction. First I’ll outline the job that “high stakes” is supposed to do according to pragmatic encroachers. Then with a bit of decision theory I’ll work out what “high stakes” would have to mean in order for it to do this job. What we end up with may or may not be an intuitively plausible account of our ordinary meaning of “high stakes” (if the ordinary use is definite enough at all) but even if it isn’t, I hope this account will focus the investigation in a productive direction. Since it follows directly from a certain version of pragmatic encroachment together with some standard decision theory, anyone who hopes to advance a rival account of stakes should not just present intuitive cases in support of it, but also explain what alternative theoretical work there is for it to do.