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Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 3547

www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

The pragmatics of belief

Igor Douven
Institute of Philosophy, University of Leuven, Belgium
Received 12 December 2006; received in revised form 28 May 2009; accepted 31 May 2009

Abstract
This paper argues that pragmatic considerations similar to the ones that Grice has shown pertain to assertability pertain to
acceptability. It further shows how this should affect some widely held epistemic principles. The idea of a pragmatics of belief is
defended against some seemingly obvious objections.
# 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Pragmatics; Grice; Apistemology; Assertability; Acceptability

Gricean pragmatics is concerned exclusively with principles of good conversation. What I would like to argue is
that some of Grices (1989) ideas also apply to what we can accept or believe. At the root of Grices thinking was the
insight that when uttering a sentence we often convey more information than what is contained in the sentences
semantic content. Due to this Grice convincingly argued even a patently true sentence may be unassertable. For,
truth being solely a matter of semantic content, by asserting a true sentence one may still suggest, or implicate,
something false, thereby possibly misleading ones audience. I will argue that much the same holds for what we can
accept: a sentence may be unacceptable even if its truth is patent to us. More specifically, the claim will be that
whether a sentence is acceptable is not merely a matter of our having evidence for it, or good reasons for believing it is
true, or anything of that sort, but also of whether it satisfies certain further conditions, conditions that are akin to
(some of) Grices celebrated conversational maxims. I aim to elaborate this claim into something hopefully deserving
of being called a theory, and will defend it against some seemingly obvious objections. But first I will state two
assumptions on which my proposal rests.

1. Preliminary assumptions

The first assumption is widely accepted among philosophers working in semantics or pragmatics and is also
implicit in Grices writings in pragmatics. It is the assumption that any differences in meaning between, for instance,

(1) Tom and Kate fell in love and therefore they married

and
(2) Tom and Kate fell in love but nonetheless they married

E-mail address: igor.douven@hiw.kuleuven.be.

0378-2166/$ see front matter # 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2009.05.025
36 I. Douven / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 3547

are to be explained pragmatically; purely semantically that is, as far as the sentences truth conditions go there is
no difference between them.1 Put differently, what but nonetheless contributes semantically to (2) is no more (nor
less) than what and therefore contributes semantically to (1), namely, the logical operation of conjunction; but these
expressions possess different pragmatic properties, which is why, at least in a pretheoretical sense of the word
meaning, (1) and (2) have different meanings.
As to the second assumption, I expect it to be uncontroversial that, from an intuitive viewpoint, believing that Tom
and Kate fell in love and therefore married is not quite the same as believing that they fell in love but nonetheless
married, and that, furthermore, a person who believes the former but not the latter is not necessarily liable to normative
criticism; rather the contrary: it would seem unreasonable were one to believe both at the same time. The assumption
now is that we ought to honor these intuitions, and that the best way to do so is by supposing a model of belief in which
the objects of belief are sentences, not propositions (conceived as truth conditions or sets of possible worlds), and on
which to believe a sentence, or at least to believe it explicitly, is to have that very sentence (or, if you prefer, its
translation into a language of thought) stored in ones memory, more particularly, the part of ones memory that some
authors like to designate as ones belief box. Advocates of this model commonly add to the foregoing the remark that
not all of a persons beliefs need be, or perhaps even can be, explicitly represented in her mind. She may believe some
things only implicitly, meaning that they are not stored in her memory but stand in some inferential relationship to
things that are. According to Harman (1986:13), a persons implicit beliefs are those that are easily inferable from
her explicit ones, but this may require some qualification, as we shall see later on.
While the precise metaphysics of beliefs will not concern us here, it should be stressed that when I say that the
objects of belief are sentences, I mean these to be understood as interpreted sentences, not purely syntactic objects.
One could perhaps think of them as being ordered pairs of propositions (traditionally conceived) and syntactic objects,
as for instance Harman (1973:88ff) and Fodor (1994:47) do, or as structured propositions in the manner of King
(2007). Also, for present purposes we need not decide whether beliefs are sentences in the believers native language or
in a language of thought shared by all thinking creatures (or at least people). For simplicitys sake, however, I will
proceed on the assumption that beliefs are sentences in the subjects native language.
Many have noted that this model of belief has undeniable phenomenological plausibility. Introspectively accessing
our beliefs seems to engage us in inner speech; reporting our beliefs to others is like thinking out loud. And the belief
box idea is just another variant of the old but still intuitively gripping metaphor of the memory as the archive or library
of the mind (see Draaisma, 2000:Ch. 2). Naturally, it does not follow that the model is correct, nor will I attempt to
show that it is; I would not be able to add anything significant to the many competent defenses of the model that are
already to be found in the literature, for instance in Harman (1973, 1982, 1986), Fodor (1975, 1998), Field (1978),
Maloney (1989), Carruthers (1996), and Devitt and Sterelny (1999); interestingly, Harman (1982:255) also briefly
points to the possibility that much of what Grice has taught us about assertion pertains as well to belief.2
I do want to note, however, that the above model of belief should appear attractive to all who are attracted to our first
assumption, inasmuch as the former helps to explain what otherwise might seem to be a puzzling consequence of the
latter. The seemingly puzzling consequence is this: If you believe that Tom and Kate married because they had fallen in
love, and hence that (1) is true, and you agree that (1) and (2) have the same truth conditions, then it seems that you
cannot but believe that (2) is true as well. But how can that be if what you believe is that Tom and Kate fell in love and
therefore married, and decisively not that they fell in love but nonetheless married?
Here, the belief box model helps because it makes it natural to distinguish between believing a sentence to be true,
in the sense of judging it to be true, and believing it (simpliciter), meaning that one has the sentence stored in ones
belief box. When Joan tells us Harolds phone number, then, fully trusting her on this matter, we may judge true
instantaneously the sentence Harolds phone number is 2125772943. Nevertheless, committing this sentence to

1
This is, as I said, widely accepted; it is not universally accepted. See for instance Thomson (1990:60) for a dissenting opinion: [I]f Susan is
unhappy despite Toms having married Joan, the statement that she is unhappy because Tom married Joan is flatly and definitely false. Given the
controversy about the semantics/pragmatics distinction (cf. Levinson, 2000:Ch. 3), it may be hard to find an example that all can agree on. However,
I trust that the point I want to illustrate is clear; those who disagree that (1) and (2) have identical truth conditions are free to supplant the example by
one of their own liking. (I am indebted to Alessandro Capone here.)
2
This is not to suggest that the model is uncontroversial. See Vision (1997) and Stalnaker (1999:Ch. 13) for some criticisms of it. For the
dissenters, I note that the argument to be presented below can (of course) also be read in the modus tollens direction, that is, as an argument against
the assumed model of belief rather than for the epistemological reform that appears necessary if we accept that model.
 I. Douven / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 3547 37

memory storing it in our belief box will for most of us not occur instantaneously but will take some time and
effort. Or think of the tons of facts that as high-school students we had to memorize. I had no difficulty judging them
true there being no reason to distrust my teachers but, as often enough I have had to discover to my distress, that
was no guarantee that they ended up being stored in my memory. Such examples show that believing a sentence to be
true, or judging it to be true, does not necessarily mean that one believes it in the sense of having the sentence in ones
belief box, though presumably if one believes a sentence (has it in ones belief box), then one will also judge it to be
true. And given this distinction, it makes perfectly good sense to say that if you believe (1), then while upon
consideration you should judge (2) to be true, you need not (and even should not, as I will argue) believe the latter;
having judged it to be true, you need not (and should not) make the additional effort of storing it in your belief box. (To
forestall misunderstanding, I should like to note that judging (2) to be true is not the same as believing (having in ones
belief box) the sentence It is true that Tom and Kate fell in love but nonetheless they married. Indeed, if you believe
that Tom and Kate married because they had fallen in love, you should refrain from believing the cited sentence for the
same or much the same reason for which, as I will argue, you should refrain from believing (2). There would be nothing
wrong, though, with judging true It is true that Tom and Kate fell in love but nonetheless they married, just as there
would be nothing wrong with judging true (2).3)
Below, accepting a sentence will be used to indicate the act of storing a sentence in ones belief box, or beginning
to believe it. So in particular when it is said that you should not accept a given sentence, or that a sentence is
unacceptable, what is meant is that you should not begin to believe the sentence, not (necessarily) that you should not
judge it to be true.

2. The pragmatics of belief

To come to the main theme of the paper, let me begin by noting something common to such popular epistemological
principles as the
Good Reasons Principle (GRP): A sentence S is acceptable to a person P if P has good reasons to believe that S is
true,
or the
Evidential Support Principle (ESP): A sentence S is acceptable to a person P if the totality of Ps evidence
(strongly) supports the truth of S.
The commonality I mean is that for either of these and for similar principles it holds that if a sentence S is acceptable to
us according to the principle, then so is S0 if we know S0 to have the same truth conditions as S has. Consider, for
instance, that if S is acceptable to a given person according to GRP, then that person must have good reasons for
believing that S is true. If she then knows that S is true iff S0 is, she will also have good reasons for believing that S0 is
true. As a result, S0 will be acceptable to her according to GRP. Equally, on all extant theories of evidence it holds that if
a body of evidence (strongly) supports S, and S0 is known to have the same truth conditions as S, then that body of
evidence (strongly) supports S0 as well. Consequently, if S is acceptable to a person according to ESP, and if that person
knows that S and S0 have identical truth conditions, then S0 is automatically acceptable to her as well according to ESP.
Proponents of principles like these and virtually all philosophers endorse at least one such principle apparently
find it unthinkable that a sentence could qualify as acceptable by virtue of them (e.g., enjoy strong evidential support),
and nevertheless possess some property, perhaps unrelated to its propositional content (in that a different sentence with
the same propositional content might not have it), that renders the sentence unacceptable after all.
Or consider another familiar and widely endorsed principle regarding acceptability:
Closure Principle (CP): If sentences S1, . . ., Sn are all acceptable to a person P, and the joint truth of those
sentences recognizably entails the truth of S, then S is acceptable to P, too.
That a sentence S, recognizably entailed by S1^. . .^Sn, might possess some property that could make it unacceptable
even if all of S1, . . ., Sn are acceptable, a property that again might stand in no direct relationship to Ss propositional

3
Thanks to Timothy Williamson here.
38 I. Douven / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 3547

content, seems to be a possibility the many proponents of CP are not willing to take seriously, or even take to be ruled
out on conceptual grounds.
Thus, more polemically put, the claim to be argued for is that, as they stand, principles GRP and ESP, and others that
share the said commonality, are false, for there are properties of sentences pragmatic properties that can make a
sentence unacceptable even if some sentence we know to be semantically equivalent to it is acceptable to us.4
Concomitantly, it may be that all of a number of sentences are acceptable to us and that the truth of these sentences
recognizably entails the truth of another sentence, but that yet the latter is not acceptable to us because of some non-
truth-related property or properties it has.
Why is this plausible at all? From personal experience we know all too well that human memory is not fully
dependable: it has happened to all of us that a belief we had stored for a long time suddenly seemed to have vanished or
at least become temporarily inaccessible. But while there is no denying this fact, we can and do, I submit take
certain measures in order to reduce or contain as much as possible the effects this may have on our (epistemic) lives. As
far as I can see, these countermeasures if you will can all be grouped under the following broad principle:
Epistemic Hygienics (EH): Do not accept sentences that could mislead your future selves.
This principle may appear somewhat vague, but I hope the following examples will both clarify it and underline its
importance.
Consider again sentences (1) and (2) about Tom and Kate. Suppose I have excellent evidence that Tom and Kate fell
in love and therefore married, so that, according to ESP, (1) is acceptable to me. Then, given CP and the fact that, on
any plausible understanding of recognizable, (1) recognizably entails (2), the latter is acceptable to me, too.
Suppose I accept (2) (along with (1) perhaps). Further, suppose that there is no contrast between Tom and Kates falling
in love and their having married, that I have excellent evidence for the absence of that contrast, and that therefore I also
accept a sentence saying that such a contrast does not exist. Then while it may at first seem harmless that I have
accepted (2), I cannot exclude that one day I will forget that the contrast suggested by the sentence is spurious. And if I
do forget that, but keep believing (2), I could easily come to suspect that there was a contrast between the conjuncts of
(2). Surely, I might say to myself, I must have had some reason for accepting that particular sentence, with its
particular wording! Speculation might then even lead me to think that perhaps Tom and Kate had both been married
before and that each of them had confided to me that were they ever to be in love again, they would not make the
mistake of marrying again, and that I had forgotten their confidences.
To give another example, note that

(3) Peggys car is blue

recognizably entails

(4) Peggys car is bluish.

It follows that if, say, my evidence strongly supports (3), then, given ESP and CP, both (3) and (4) are acceptable to
me.5 In that case it would still be unwise to accept (4), however, for while I may believe or even know now that Peggys
car is not just bluish, but even plain blue, I may forget this. And if I do, while retaining my belief in (4), I may come to
think that Peggys car was not plain blue (Why else would I have accepted this specific sentence?).
Or, similarly, assume that the following sentences are true and that their truth is evident to me:

(5) Tom and Kate married, and Kate got pregnant.

4
Depending on exactly how we spell out the notion of having good reasons and, respectively, that of evidential support, principles GRP and ESP
may need qualification in order to block the Lottery and Preface Paradoxes. (Cf. Kyburg, 1961; Makinson, 1965 for the original presentations of
these paradoxes.) But the problem I want to discuss goes deeper than those paradoxes in that it equally affects supposedly paradox-free variants of
these principles, which are typically much more involved. Thus, to avoid needless complications, I only consider the unadorned principles here.
5
On some confirmation theories ESP alone is enough for the conclusion that (4) is acceptable to me if (3) is. But, for instance, on the currently
popular Bayesian confirmation theory it is not, for on that theory one can have strong evidence for a sentence without also having strong evidence for
a sentence one knows to follow logically from the first.
 I. Douven / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 3547 39

(6) Tom and Kates marriage preceded Kates pregnancy.

Then, given CP and presumably either of ESP and GRP, not only (5) and (6) are acceptable to me, but so too are all of
these:

(7) Kate got pregnant, and Tom and Kate married.

(8) Tom and Kate married, and Kate got pregnant, and the former took place before the latter.

(9) Kate got pregnant, and she and Tom married, and the latter took place before the former.

But notice that, no matter how many of these sentences I accept, if (7) is among them, there is again the risk that one
day that will be the only one of them I still remember. If that should happen, it is, for reasons that will sound familiar by
now, well conceivable that I come to believe, or at least surmise, that Kate got pregnant first and that only then did she
and Tom marry.
We could easily go on in this way. Accepting Even Albert passed the exam when it is clear to you that Albert was
the least likely to fail the exam, is imprudent because by so doing you are taking the risk of coming to believe or at
least surmise that, though Albert passed the exam, this was something of a surprise. Accepting Tracy is a not
unjust person if you know that Tracy is a perfectly just person might later lead you to suspect wrongly that Tracy is no
more than a reasonably just person. Accepting the true sentence John has three children when you know he has five
might one day make you think falsely that he has exactly three children. If you succeeded in swimming a mile on June
1, 2008, accepting I tried to swim a mile on June 1, 2008 might, while true, later lead you to believe falsely that the
attempt was unsuccessful. And so on and so forth.
One way to forestall the mistake of coming to suspect that there is some contrast between Tom and Kates falling in
love and their having married, or that Peggys car is not plain blue, et cetera, is simply not to forget that there was no
contrast between Tom and Kates falling in love and their having married, and similarly for the other cases. But the
shudder quotes around the word simply are there, of course, precisely because we know there is no way we can
make sure that we will not forget things we currently believe or even know, things that would prevent us from drawing
wrong conclusions from sentences such as (2), (4), and (7) (wrong, that is, given the assumptions we made in the above
examples). What in these cases we can do, and what does seem to be simple, is refrain from accepting those sentences.
EH merely generalizes this recommendation.
Before proceeding with our discussion of EH, let me notice that it is no objection to say that we will always run
some risk of coming to believe something false unless we content ourselves with accepting trivialities. The point is that
in none of the above cases is there any reason to run the additional risk of inferring, at some time in the future,
something false (or at least something we now have excellent reason to believe is false) from what we believe, given
that instead of the problematic sentences we can accept, respectively, (1), (3), and one or more of (5), (6), (8), and (9).
For this reason, it would also be wrong to think that if the argument for EH is accepted, then we should also accept that
if, say, believing that global warming will lead to environmental disaster would depress me so much that it would
jeopardize my future research, then I should not believe it, however good my evidence for it is. It is most unlikely, after
all, that I could as well accept a sentence with the same truth conditions as Global warming will lead to environmental
disaster but that could be assumed to have a significantly different effect on my emotional well-being. This is not to
say that it could not be argued that, for epistemic reasons, I should not believe that global warming will lead to
environmental disaster if that would depress me; perhaps it can. But no argument to that effect flows from, or is even
suggested by, my case for EH.6
It is important to note the pragmatic nature of the recommendation EH makes. That, given what we assumed about
the situations in the examples, I should accept neither (2) nor (4) nor (7) has nothing to do with the truth of those
sentences (they are all true, we supposed) nor with the evidence I have for them (by supposition, I have excellent
evidence for all of them, or at least they follow, by virtue of CP, from sentences I have excellent evidence for), but
rather with what they would or at least might suggest to me in the event that I forget about things currently available to
me, a possibility with which I must reckon.

6
Thanks to Timothy Williamson for pressing me on this.
40 I. Douven / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 3547

In fact, we can see several parallels between the foregoing and Gricean pragmatics. First of all, the closeness of EH
to Grices (1989:26) overarching Cooperative Principle, which in its possibly briefest form might be put as Do not
mislead your audience by what you say, is more than patent. According to Grices principle, one should not assert (2),
(4), or (7) under the given circumstances because by doing so one would mislead ones audience. Naturally, by
accepting them I would not mislead my present self. How could I, given that I know, or have excellent evidence, or
good reasons for believing, that what these sentences suggest as opposed to what they literally say is false? But
by accepting them I can mislead my future selves, who may have forgotten about the evidence my present self
possesses, as much as I can or could mislead my present audience by asserting any of (2), (4), and (7).
If EH parallels the Cooperative Principle, what, if anything, parallels the Gricean maxims, which flesh out that
principle? Basically, the maxims, at least many of them, and at least often,7 can do double duty, for they can easily be
interpreted broadly enough so as to apply to acceptance, too, and not only to assertion. Consider, for instance, sentence
(4) again. That the car is not plain blue is, on Grices theory, something we infer from an assertion of (4) in virtue of the
fact that if the car is plain blue, the assertion violates the Maxim of Quantity according to which one should make ones
contribution to a conversation as informative as possible, or in any case not less informative than one is able to (unless
there is a good reason to the contrary, for example, if making the contribution more informative would be
disproportionally time or effort consuming). Surely if ones evidence strongly suggests that Peggys car is blue, or if
one even knows as much, then by asserting (4) one is being less informative than one could be, to no apparent
advantage. The example seems to make plain that the conversational Maxim of Quantity is not essentially
conversational at all. At any rate, interpreted as a maxim pertaining to acceptance it may help us to preclude that some
day we will come to believe something we now know to be false. Much the same holds in the case of (7). According to
Grices Maxim of Order (a sub-maxim of the Maxim of Manner), we should relate events in an orderly fashion. The
third example above the one involving sentences (5)(9) suggests that this maxim applies to belief as well, in that
we should not accept a conjunction if its conjuncts do not occur in it in the order in which they became (or will become)
true. It is not hard to think of similar examples showing that (most of) Grices other maxims can be plausibly thought of
as applying not only to speech but to acceptance or belief as well.
A third parallel is that neither the Gricean maxims nor their equivalents at the level of belief offer anything like a
failsafe system of rules for complying with the Cooperative Principle, respectively with EH. To see this, suppose you
have been told by someone you have no reason to distrust that John has three children. Now suppose you later come to
know that John has exactly five children. Still later, however, you forget that he has five children. If at that time you still
have stored in your memory the sentence

(10) John has three children

you might come to think that John has exactly three children (coming to know that John has exactly five children may
not have been a reason to erase (10) from your memory). That is, even though your accepting (10) may have involved
no apparent infringement of any pragmatic principle of belief at the time you accepted it, you had good reasons for
believing that John has exactly three children, or so we may suppose there is no guarantee that the sentence will not
still lead you to believe something false one day. That this has a parallel in Gricean pragmatics could easily be
overlooked. The literature on pragmatics focuses, understandably, on examples of miscommunication due to an
infringement of this or that maxim. However, this should not blind us to the fact that even in situations in which all of
Grices maxims are respected, miscommunication is not at all uncommon. We all know how easily misunderstandings
occur, despite peoples good communicative intentions. But while attending to the maxims of conversation and to
those of belief will not fully eliminate the risk of misleading ones audience and ones future selves, respectively, it
may still be the best way to minimize those risks, and to come as close as one can to complying with the Cooperative
Principle and EH.
The last parallel I want to point to concerns the deeper explanations of both Gricean pragmatics and the pragmatics
of belief, that is, EH together with the Gricean maxims interpreted sufficiently broadly. It is by now hardly contested

7
I am not entirely sure that all of them can be plausibly read as applying to acceptance, nor that those that can be so read can be supposed to apply
in any type of context in the exact same way to acceptance as they apply or would apply to assertion in the given type of context. But of course I am
not claiming that there is a one to one correspondence between Gricean pragmatics and what I call the pragmatics of belief, but only that there are
philosophically interesting parallels between the two.
 I. Douven / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 3547 41

that the best explanation of why we developed the routine to which Grice was the first to draw our attention of
saying one thing and at the same time suggesting further things, is the discrepancy between the rate at which the
mechanics of the human speech apparatus permits us to articulate information and the rate at which our cognitive
apparatus is able to process information; the latter is a number of times greater than the former (cf. Levinson,
2000:27ff). That there is as I hope to have made plausible a pragmatics not only of speech acts but also of what
we can believe seems to have an explanation similarly in terms of human deficiencies, albeit, as we saw, not
mechanical but cognitive deficiencies. At bottom, it is because of these deficiencies that a sentence may even be
evidently true and yet unacceptable.
The existence of at least some of the above parallels should not be a great surprise. For, first, Bach (2005:18) is
rather obviously right to observe that the same basic principles [i.e., broadly Gricean principles] that govern face-
to-face communication govern other sorts of communication as well, even though in those cases the participants
generally have less information to go on, about the communicative setting and about each other. And secondly, it
should be equally obvious that, on the model of belief we are assuming, it makes sense to say that accepting a sentence
(i.e., storing it in ones belief box) is in many respects like writing a note to oneself while not knowing in advance
when, or even if, one is ever going to read it; that is, accepting a sentence is, in a way, like communicating with ones
future selves, just as we sometimes communicate with others through writing notes. Indeed, it is for this reason that all
of the above examples can readily be made to support Bachs point. For that, we only need to imagine that the
sentences they involve are, instead of stored in a persons memory, written down on a slip of paper. Surely, if one
believes or knows that Peggys car is blue, it would be as wrong to write down (4) on a note as it would be to assert it.
It merits emphasis that there is also an important dissimilarity between the pragmatics of speech acts and the
pragmatics of belief. This is due, in effect, to something Bach also points to in the above citation, to wit, that in face-
to-face communication the process of interpretation is partly guided by information that is typically unavailable in less
direct forms of communication. To explain how that restricts the kind of information a written note and, by analogy, a
belief can be assumed to convey, as compared to the information a corresponding utterance conveys or would convey, I
must first say a few words about the notion of implicature.
Famously, Grice distinguishes between conventional implicatures implicatures that arise because of the
conventional meanings of particular words, such as but and therefore and conversational implicatures, which
derive from what is said in conjunction with the assumption that the speaker is trying to be helpful (i.e., attending to the
Cooperative Principle). It is somewhat less well known that implicatures of the latter type can be subdivided in
generalized conversational implicatures (GCIs) and particularized conversational implicatures (PCIs). Grice
(1989:37ff) already made this distinction, but it has been fully elaborated only by later writers, most notably Levinson,
who defines an implicature i from an utterance of a sentence S to be a GCI iff any utterance of S implicates i, barring
specific and unusual countervailing contextual assumptions; by contrast, the implicature is said to be a PCI iff it arises
only by virtue of specific and unusual contextual assumptions (Levinson, 2000:16). To illustrate the difference, an
utterance of the sentence (10) will usually implicate that John has exactly three children; so that is a GCI of the
sentence. However, depending on whether the sentence is uttered in response to the question why John has not been
publishing lately as much as he did at the beginning of his career or the question whether we should invite John to our
party, it may have very different PCIs; in the former case, it could implicate something like Raising his children takes
a lot of Johns time and energy, in the latter case, rather something like Better not, perhaps, because he may bring his
children.
Now notice that, typically, when we write a sentence on a note we are unable to predict in what context the
envisaged reader will be what she will be believing, or presupposing when (if) she reads it. For that reason, we
will not even attempt to incorporate into the message we hope to convey by the note a PCI that would be generated by
an assertion of what is on the note in the context the reader will be in when or if she reads it. Nor will we attempt to
incorporate into that message a PCI that would be generated by an assertion of the sentence on the note in the context
we are in when we write it, for we know that the reader will generally be unaware of that context; even if the note is one
to ourselves, we will realize when we write it that we are unlikely to remember the specificities of the context we are in
by the time we read it. Because when we read a note, we know, or may at least confidently assume, that the note-writer
will have realized all of the foregoing, we will not assume that any specific contextual information is required to
interpret correctly whatever is on the note. In fact, that the decoding of what is on it requires no such information could
be said to be part of the note-writers and the note-readers common knowledge (in the technical sense of Lewis, 1969).
This means that, when we read a note, we may disregard any PCI an assertion of the sentence on the note would
42 I. Douven / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 3547

generate in the context we happen to be in, and also need not wonder which PCI or PCIs an assertion of it might have
generated in the context in which the note was written. By the same token, we need not query, when reading a note,
whether, perhaps because of specific contextual assumptions the writer made when she wrote the note, some GCI
which is normally carried by assertions of the sentence on the note should not be taken to be part of the message she
intended to convey. Thus, for instance, when we read on a note the sentence (10), this can be unproblematically
interpreted as meaning that John has exactly three children. On the other hand, we do not have to worry whether, for
instance, the note-writer may have wanted to give us some hint to the effect that we should not invite John to an
upcoming party. If that was what she had wanted to communicate, the note no doubt would have read something like
Better not invite John to the party.
The analogy between writing notes to oneself and storing beliefs still seems to hold. If it does, it follows that we can
mislead our future selves by accepting sentences such as (2), (4), and (7), whose assertions would generate false
conventional implicatures (as an assertion of (2) would do) or false GCIs (as assertions of (4) and (7) would do), but
that there is no similar risk if, knowing that John has exactly three children, we accept the sentence (10), whichever
false PCIs it might generate when asserted in the context in which we accept it or, for that matter, in any other context.
Such PCIs will not mislead our future selves for the simple reason that these selves will disregard them or, even more
likely, be unaware of them when (if) they retrieve the stored belief.
Let us suppose that the foregoing is basically correct. So, there is such a thing as a pragmatics of belief and this is
roughly captured by EH and, in its train, by correlates of at least many of Grices maxims. Then how should this affect
principles such as ESP and GRP? A straightforward way to do justice to the epistemic significance of what are
standardly regarded as pragmatic properties of sentences would be to supplant, for instance, ESP by the following
thesis:
Revised Evidential Support Principle (RESP): Sentence S is acceptable to person P if P has excellent evidence
for the truth of S and, in addition, (it is acceptable to P that /P knows that /P has good reasons to believe that /P
has excellent evidence that /. . .) by accepting S, P would not violate EH,
and similarly for GRP and other variants of ESP. Note that a corresponding revision of CP would seem necessary as
well. After all, that a set contains only sentences that are acceptable according to, say, RESP, does not seem to
guarantee that it recognizably entails only sentences one could accept without violating EH. The following
reformulation does, however:
Revised Closure Principle (RCP): If (i) sentences S1, . . ., Sn are acceptable to P, (ii) S1^. . .^Sn recognizably entails
S, and (iii) (it is acceptable to P that/ . . .) by accepting S, P would not violate EH, then S is acceptable to P.
I think much can be said for including something like the phrase within brackets in both RESP and RCP. Suppose, for
instance, that John actually has three children but you have excellent (though misleading) evidence for the sentence
John has five children. Then you may and on most conceptions of evidence will also have excellent evidence
for (10), that is, the sentence John has three children. It would still seem unreasonable were (10) to qualify as being
acceptable to you under the given circumstances. After all, from your current perspective you cannot but regard that
sentence as being potentially misleading to your future selves. And yet it is hard to maintain that by accepting it you
would be violating EH. If, for the kind of reasons repeatedly encountered above (and not because you have received
additional evidence), you would at some point come to believe that John has exactly three children, it could hardly be
said that you would have misled your self-at-that-time by accepting, earlier, (10), for John does have exactly three
children. So, if we read RESP leaving out the bracketed phrase, then (10) is acceptable to you under the given
circumstances, our intuitions notwithstanding. But of course you do not have excellent evidence, or good reasons for
believing, or whatever, that by accepting that sentence you would not be violating EH; rather the contrary in fact.
Hence, with the bracketed phrase, RESP does not rule (10) acceptable.
However, the exact formulation of necessary or sufficient conditions for acceptability, and of a closure principle for
acceptability, need not detain us here. The point I am mainly hoping to get across is that all epistemic principles such as
ESP and CP will have to be altered so that our judgments about the acceptability (or otherwise) of sentences are
informed not only by semantic but also by pragmatic considerations. Naturally, saying that these principles will have
to be altered in the indicated way does not, by itself, imply that they cannot be stated strictly in terms of truth, and must
always make reference to EH or a similar principle. It may for instance be possible to reformulate RESP in such a way
that it refers only to truth again, but now to the truth not only of the sentence in question but also of what we might
 I. Douven / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 3547 43

call its normal implicatures, that is, its conventional implicatures (if it has any) plus its GCIs (if it has any). For
instance, let S normally implicate i1, . . ., in. Then we might say that S is acceptable to person P if P has excellent
evidence for S ^ i1 ^. . .^ in. Something similar might work for RCP. Whether these alternative definitions would
ultimately be defensible will largely depend on how tight exactly the parallel between the pragmatics of belief and that
of assertion is (I left open the possibility that some normal implicatures of sentences may be relevant to assertability
but not to acceptability). But, as intimated, the exact formulation of these principles is not my primary concern.
To round off the presentation of the pragmatics of belief, I want to state more clearly than I did in section 1 how I
think a persons implicit beliefs are related to her explicit ones. It seems reasonable to suppose that any definition of
implicit belief should satisfy at least the following two desiderata.
If someone believes explicitly

(11) Tom and Kate fell in love with each other and they married

that should imply that she also believes

(12) Kate and Tom fell in love with each other and they married,

even if she does not believe (12) explicitly. Harmans definition of implicit belief appears to satisfy this desideratum,
for it seems that (12) is easily inferable from (11) if anything is.
The second desideratum concerns the fact that if someone believes explicitly

(13) Tom and Kate married because they had fallen in love with each other

then, were she asked whether she (also) believes

(14) Tom and Kate married in spite of the fact that they had fallen in love with each other,

the answer would, we may suppose, be negative. So then she should not come out otherwise on a definition of implicit
belief: the definition would appear inadequate if it entailed that we implicitly believe things we would, were we to
consider them explicitly, deny we believe. Because of the vagueness of the term easily inferable, it is hard to say
whether Harmans definition satisfies this desideratum. Of course, it does not take much to recognize that if one of the
sentences is true, then so is the other. If that is enough for the one to be easily inferable from the other, then Harmans
definition evidently does not satisfy the desideratum. However, it seems clear that we would not conclude, in any
pretheoretically plausible sense of the word conclude, that, for instance, Tom and Kate married in spite of their
having fallen in love with each other, on the basis of the information that they married because they had fallen in love
with each other. Thus, if we read easily inferable as willingness to conclude readily, a reading that seems consistent
with anything Harman says in this connection, then his definition does seem to satisfy the second desideratum.
Be this as it may, the following definition of implicit belief seems to satisfy both these desiderata:
Implicit Belief (IB): If (i) person P explicitly believes all of S1, . . ., Sn, (ii) P does not explicitly believe S,
(iii) S1 ^ . . . ^ Sn recognizably entails S, and (iv) on the supposition that all of S1, . . ., Sn are acceptable to P, P
would, by accepting S, not be violating EH, then P implicitly believes S.
So, someone who explicitly believes (13) but not (14) will, on this definition, not come out as believing the latter
implicitly. While (13) recognizably entails (14), on the supposition that the former is acceptable to the person, she still
cannot accept the latter without violating EH. Furthermore, if (11), but not (12), is among a persons explicit beliefs,
then (12) is among her implicit beliefs, for (12) is an obvious consequence of (11), and if we suppose that the latter is
acceptable to the believer, then by accepting (12) she certainly will not be violating EH.
By way of some comments on this, I note that if you are happy to say that anything a person believes explicitly she
ipso facto believes implicitly, then clause (ii) can be omitted from the definition of implicit belief. Note further that
clause (iv) could not simply read that were P to accept S, she would not violate EH. Someone explicitly believing (11)
may, by accepting it, have violated EH, for instance, because she knew when she accepted the sentence that, somewhat
unusually, Tom and Kate first got married and only then fell in love with each other. Then that person would also be
44 I. Douven / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 3547

violating EH were she to accept (12). But we would still want to say that she implicitly believes the latter. Finally, it
may be possible to replace IB also by a definition that, like the alternative to RESP suggested five paragraph back, does
not make reference to EH but rather to the truth of the normal implicatures of the entailed and entailing sentences.
I want to end this section by making two more general comments on the foregoing. The first addresses a worry that
especially those who sympathize with the gist of my proposal may have, namely, that the theory as presented so far is
seriously incomplete and, in particular, needs complementing by principles of a more economic bent. For it might
be thought our memories are not just not fully dependable, they are also finite. Moreover, storing a sentence in ones
memory seems to be an act that takes time and effort, both of which could be spent on other projects. Such
considerations underlie, for instance, the following principle proposed in Harman (1986:12):
Clutter Avoidance (CA): One should not clutter ones mind with trivialities.
A similar principle would be one implying that of (5)(9), one should accept only (5), because this sentence seems to
require the least storage space, and yet at least if it is true that the Gricean maxims apply not only to assertions but
also to beliefs is no less informative than any of the others.
However, while I am not in principle opposed to the idea of extending the theory with principles such as CA, I am
not convinced that this is necessary. There is, to the best of my knowledge, no empirical evidence suggesting that
sentence (8) requires more storage space than (5) does, or that we can really clutter up our minds, whether with
trivialities or with anything else. And, by itself, nothing important in this respect seems to follow from the fact that we
are finite beings. There fit infinitely many numbers into any finite segment of the real line. So why should it be
impossible for infinitely many beliefs to fit into a finite brain? Of course it may be impossible, but if it is, then that is
something for scientists to discover, not for philosophers to postulate.8 It may be rightly said that, by contrast, we do
not need scientists to tell us that memorizing things may take considerable time and effort. And this might seem to
motivate a principle to the effect that we ought to accept a sentence only if doing so is worth the effort. However, while
I have no misgivings about this recommendation as such, I do not believe it needs stating as a separate principle, given
that it seems to be subsumed under a much broader action-theoretic principle that all or at least most of us will already
endorse, namely, that we ought to perform an act of any kind only if the expected benefits of doing so outweigh
the expected costs (but if for some reason you do not endorse this more general principle, feel free to add the
aforementioned recommendation concerning acceptance to the theory proposed in this section).9
As a second general comment, I note that some might be tempted to think that the pragmatics of belief will also
rid us of the infamous and much-discussed Gettier problem in epistemology (for a discussion of it in the pages of
this journal, see Bogusawski, 2002).10 To be sure, it does solve some paradigmatic problem cases. For instance,
in one of Gettiers (1963) own examples, Smith is said to be justified in believing that either Jones owns a Ford or
Brown is in Boston, given that (i) Smith has strong evidence for the first disjunct, and (ii) he has competently
deduced the disjunction from the first disjunct. In the story, the disjunction happens to be true, even though the
first disjunct is in fact false. This is then alleged to be a case of justified true belief that is not knowledge. Clearly,
given EH it no longer holds that Smith is justified in believing the disjunction, so that the case would no longer be
one of justified true belief. But, first, it is unclear to me how the pragmatics of belief could offer any help in
blocking, for instance, Ginets Gettier case (see Stine, 1976), where a person standing in front of a real barn
located in an area in which most things that look like a barn are actually fake barns, is alleged to have a justified
true belief, but not knowledge, that she is facing a barn. Indeed, it is unlikely that the pragmatics of belief could
help us out here, given that the person could have believed exactly as she does and have known that the object in
front of her is a barn, namely, if she had not been so unlucky as to be in an area with mostly fake barns. But,
second, this presupposes that a solution to the Gettier problem is needed, and I am not convinced of that.
Specifically, in Douven (2005) I have argued that only some of the cases that in the literature have been presented
as Gettier cases are really deserving of that name, and that the ones that are correctly classified as Gettier cases do
not constitute counterexamples against the classical tripartite analysis of knowledge.

8
Or to assume without argument, as for instance Field (1978:16) does.
9
As we will see in the next section, in the reply to the fourth objection, EH itself already does serve to economize our epistemic lives somewhat.
10
That the pragmatics of belief might be able to help with resolving the Gettier problem was suggested to me by Alessandro Capone and,
independently, Christopher Hookway.
 I. Douven / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 3547 45

3. Anticipated objections

In this section I present and try to defuse some objections that might be raised against the idea of a pragmatics of
belief, especially my account thereof.
Objection 1. Principles such as RGRP and RESP are impractical and, in general, the recommendation that EH
makes is not one we can follow. For that would assume that acceptance is something under our control so that we
could for instance refrain from accepting (4) when we have excellent reason for believing that Peggys car is plain blue
but as many philosophers have argued, it is not. To cite a much-used example, when you see a red bus, there is
typically no decision involved in judging it to be red; it happens automatically.
Reply. Here it is especially important not to overlook the distinction we made (in section 1) between judging a
sentence to be true and accepting it in the sense of storing it in ones belief box. Even if the judgment that some
sentence is true proceeds automatically, storing it in ones belief box does not generally do so and often requires an act
of the will. Recall, in this connection, what was said about memorizing phone numbers, or the facts one has to learn in
preparation for a school exam. Apart from this, it seems not too unrealistic to suppose that, in the case of sentences that
if I am right we should not accept for broadly pragmatic reasons, there is a mechanism that will prevent them
from popping into our memories, namely, that we not only automatically judge them to be true (if we do) but also
automatically judge them to be potentially misleading to our future selves. This is not to imply that one can have 100%
certainty that no sentence one judges to be true but potentially misleading will ever, inadvertently, slip into ones
memory. But first to repeat an earlier point it would be wrong to think of the pragmatics of belief as offering a
failsafe system against coming to hold beliefs that in the future may mislead one, just as it would be wrong to think of
Gricean pragmatics as offering a failsafe system against miscommunication. And second, there may be no guarantee
that no sentence one judges to be false will ever slip into ones memory, either. Gilbert et al. (1990) in fact report
experimental evidence suggesting that such slips do occur. By way of explanation, the authors suggest that in order to
assess a piece of information we momentarily accept it, and then subsequently unaccept it if we assess it to be false.
The unacceptance mechanism, they believe, is reliable but not infallible; it may for instance fail if we are distracted
immediately after the assessment of the information at issue. I submit that if this mechanism exists indeed, it may serve
as well to unaccept sentences we judge to be true but potentially misleading.
Objection 2. Contrary to what EH suggests, one should accept both (3) and (4) when one has good reasons for
believing that Peggys car is plain blue. Precisely because we have this unfortunate tendency to forget things, storing
(4) next to (3) will add some security: if one should forget (3), one may still have (4) among ones beliefs, which does
give one correct (even though somewhat unspecific) information about the color of Peggys car for that is bluish
(anything blue is bluish) and so is better than nothing.
Reply. We already noted that storing sentences is not something that in general occurs entirely automatically; it
consumes resources that could have been spent differently, on more useful things perhaps. Indeed, it is plausible to
assume that, having stored (3), it would take extra time and effort to store (4) in addition. The extra security which this
could yield may not be worth the extra expenditure of time and effort it would take. More importantly, in cases in
which it is so important to retain a given belief that it is worth some extra time and effort to add some security in this
respect, it would seem a bad strategy to store a sentence that has the same truth conditions as the designated belief but
that might mislead one in the future. In those cases the more sensible strategy would clearly seem to be to spend some
extra time and energy on memorizing the particular sentence one not only believes to be true but also believes to harbor
no (or much less) risk of misleading one some day. Thus, if it is very important to you not to forget that Peggys car is
plain blue, say (3) again to yourself, perhaps a few times, and perhaps even say it aloud, if that will help to make it
stick; that would seem a much better investment, epistemically speaking, than additionally storing (4).
Objection 3. The proposal has a simple but important drawback, namely, that deduction can no longer generally be
regarded as a method of extending ones knowledge.11 For instance, it would normally seem that if I know (3) that
is, that Peggys car is blue I can extend my knowledge by deducing from it (4), that is, that the car is bluish. But if I
want to adhere to EH, then that possibility is foreclosed. After all, according to that principle I should not accept (4),

11
Cf. Williamson (2000:117ff) for a defense of CP (or something very close to it) by appeal to the intuition that deduction from known premises is
a way of gaining knowledge.
46 I. Douven / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 3547

for the reason that doing so might in the future make me think that Peggys car is not plain blue. More generally, it was
argued that the current proposal requires the replacement of CP by some more restrictive closure principle.
Reply. The objection is right in claiming that, if EH is adopted, deduction is not a general method of extending ones
knowledge, but I can see no reason for calling this a drawback. In particular, I can see no reason for believing that EH
would block an extension of ones knowledge by deduction when such an extension could be useful. To be sure, it does
not permit us to add (4) to our knowledge when (3) is part of that. But what benefits could there be to accepting (4)
when one knows (3)? (That (4) might serve as a kind of back-up for the eventuality that one forgets (3) was already
seen not to be a good reason for accepting the former.) In fact, we know that there is a possible risk attached to
accepting (4) if (3) is true. It is therefore not a good argument against EH that in this case it blocks what otherwise
would have been an easy extension of ones knowledge. A similar story can be told about the other examples we used.
By contrast, it is certainly not the case that, for instance, EH bars us from extending our knowledge of arithmetic by
deducing theorems from the Peano axioms. Asserting a sentence that expresses even a very simple theorem, like
7 + 5 = 12, does not implicate that one is not in a position to assert the stronger conjunction of the axioms of
arithmetic. Correspondingly, should I ever forget those axioms, the presence of the sentence 7 + 5 = 12 in my belief
box will not lead me to think that I have never known the axioms. Similarly, asserting Some of my colleagues
organized a conference, does not implicate that I do not know which colleagues exactly organized the conference; the
assertion may be somewhat unspecific because I think that telling precisely which colleagues did the organizing has
little relevance. I can thus unproblematically, and without running the risk of misleading some future self or selves,
derive Some of my colleagues organized the conference from My colleagues Tom, Dick, and Harry organized the
conference and store it in my belief box. Should I ever forget which colleagues exactly organized the conference, but
retain the belief that some colleagues organized the conference, I will not easily come to think that I have never known
who exactly organized the conference. At most I will conclude correctly that either I have forgotten who exactly
organized the conference or I have never possessed that information (but I may still remember that I knew who
organized the conference, or infer from background knowledge that I must have known this, and thus draw the right
conclusion that I have forgotten who organized the conference). As far as I can see, the conclusion we can draw from
these examples generalizes: whenever deduction can or even just might usefully serve to extend our knowledge, EH
does not get in the way.
As an aside, it is worth mentioning that Nozicks (1981) epistemology also violates the principle that knowledge is
closed at least under known entailment (though in a much more radical way than an epistemology that incorporates EH
would be required to do). DeRose (1995:201) criticizes Nozick for being committed to (what he calls) abominable
conjunctions of the form P knows that she has two hands, but she does not know that she is not a (handless) brain-
in-a-vat. Of course, endorsing EH does not commit us to any of those conjunctions. That is not to say that it does not
commit us to any conjunction DeRose might find abominable. For instance, it does seem to imply that the following
conjunction could be true: P knows that Peggys car is blue, but P does not know that it is bluish. Though,
admittedly, this sounds strange, we must at once note on behalf of EH that it also saves us from having to say that the
following could be true: I know that Tom and Kate fell in love and therefore married and I also know that they fell in
love but nonetheless married. So, if we are to judge EH by the sound of conjunctions that may be true, and of those
that cannot be, if the principle is adopted, then I think there is as much to be said in favor of it as there can be said
against it. However this may be, the considerations I have advanced in support of EH in the previous section are, to my
eyes, of a much weightier kind than the foregoing ones relating to our judgments of the odd-soundingness
(or otherwise) of certain conjunctions.
Objection 4. The pragmatic aspects of sentences do necessitate some epistemic policy, but not the one proposed in
section 2. The right policy to adopt is one we might call epistemic vigilance. This requires that we pay due attention to
the fact that our beliefs supposing these to be sentences indeed may carry potentially misleading implicatures,
and it counsels that we simply refrain from making the kind of inferences that, for instance, may lead us to think that
there is a contrast between Tom and Kates falling in love and their getting married on the basis of a belief in (2), or that
Peggys car is not plain blue on the basis of a belief in (4). In other words, we ought to disregard whatever any sentence
stored in our belief box might implicate or suggest to us, and not conclude anything from it that goes beyond its
semantic content; for instance, if (2) is among our beliefs, then what we can infer from it is that Tom and Kate fell in
love and that they married, and no more.
Reply. I do think that some sort of epistemic vigilance is called for, but not in place of incorporating EH into our
epistemology; rather, we must be vigilant in addition to that. One reason to be vigilant even if we adopt EH is that, as
 I. Douven / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 3547 47

already intimated, this principle offers no guarantee against sentences slipping into ones belief box even when one
judges them to have misleading implicatures. Another has to do with such facts as that sentence (10) may be retained in
ones belief box after one has learned that John does not have exactly three, but exactly five, children. So, yes, we
should proceed with some caution and not infer too readily things from our beliefs that go beyond their semantic
contents. But this kind of caution, or vigilance, is complementary to the kind of caution EH demands us to consider in
accepting sentences. As to the more radical kind of vigilance the objection counsels us to adopt, I see no useful
epistemic role for that once EH is adopted. Quite the contrary, in fact: it would seem to make belief management much
less efficient than it needs to be (and in reality seems to be). For consider that if I have always been committed to EH,
and know this, then I will confidently, if perhaps for the aforementioned reasons not quite unhesitatingly, infer from
(4), supposing that sentence is among my beliefs, that Peggys car is not plain blue. That is to say, my adherence to EH
makes it unnecessary to store in my belief box the sentence Peggys car is not plain blue. Were I epistemically
vigilant (in the strong sense of the objection), I would have to store that sentence next to (4) in order to provide the
same amount of information to my future selves. Adhering to EH thus seems much more efficient than adhering to the
strong version of epistemic vigilance.

Acknowledgements

I am greatly indebted to Alessandro Capone and Timothy Williamson, who acted as referees for this journal, and
whose detailed and insightful comments led to important improvements and clarifications of the paper. I am also very
grateful to Jacob Mey for excellent editorial advice and encouragement, and to Adrian Haddock for helpful comments
on a very early version of this paper.

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