Jeff Johnson

In these pages I resurrect a dispute that has, sadly I think, now gone by the wayside in current thinking about knowledge, among other things. I mean the dispute that we find Wittgenstein entertaining in certain sections of _On Certainty_ and the dispute that led John Searle to argue that there is such a thing as the assertion fallacy. The dispute turns on what lessons we can draw from the fact that in certain examples it would be fishy or odd or puzzling to say that we know. One party in the dispute, I’ll call them "saying philosophers", has it that those examples in which it would be odd to say we know aren’t examples of knowledge or of knowing. The other party, I’ll call them "meaning philosophers", agrees about the oddity but insists that the examples are still obviously examples of knowledge or of knowing and that what we say in those examples, fishy or not, is still true. I investigate this disagreement and to try and make some headway in providing support for the saying philosophers.

Grice is often taken to have delivered a decisive blow against the tendency on the part of ordinary language philosophers to suspect that the presence of particular circumstances is requisite for philosophically interesting expressions to be in order, even to make sense, when deployed in particular cases. Grice’s attack has three parts. He argues that the presence of those particular circumstances isn’t bound up with the meaning of the expressions in question—the suggestion that those circumstances are present is merely a “conversational implicature”. He offers examples designed to show that utterances of the expressions at issue may be true or false even when the circumstances alleged to be requisite are nowhere to be found. And he identifies what he sees as a collection of rules of conversation the violation of which accounts for the oddity attending those expressions uttered in the absence of the circumstances in question. Here I try to show that each of these parts of Grice’s attack against the ordinary language philosophers fails and that Grice’s blow isn’t decisive at all.

Humanely Killed? Jeff Johnson St. Catherine University, Saint Paul, Minnesota. Standard philosophical approaches to the issue of eating animals who are thought to have been humanely killed typically turn on decisions around the issue of moral status or on weighing benefits and harms of killing. Rather than pursuing these lines of inquiry, I bring out circumstances that have gotten lost in thinking we can take moral cover under the idea that farmed animals are killed humanely. In thinking about whether farmed animals have been killed humanely, we are asked to focus on the whether the deaths of these animals are painful. But much more is involved when we attend to other cases in which animals are thought to have been killed humanely. In view of these discrepancies, I argue that it is much more difficult than we might suppose to take moral cover under the idea that farmed animals can be killed humanely.

This chapter focuses on the use of gestation stalls in sow confinement facilities. Gestation stalls are metal cages used to confine sows during nearly the entire duration of their four-month pregnancy. The dimensions of gestation stalls are such that the sows confined in them can only take one step forward and one step back. The American Veterinary Medical Association’s policy statement on pregnant sow housing cites advantages of gestation stalls: Gestation stall systems may minimize aggression and injury, reduce competition, and allow individual feeding and nutritional management, assisting in control of body condition. These advantages largely mirror those identified in the National Pork Board’s position statement on gestation stalls. A survey of the considerations the industry offers in favor of gestation stalls in sow production, though, helps to show that what it means for a producer to take an interest in animal welfare is quite different from what we might expect.