Pragmatic Encroachment

Overview and Basic Idea

Pragmatic encroachment is a family of views in contemporary epistemology holding that practical factors—such as the costs of being wrong, the importance of a decision, or an agent’s aims—can affect whether a person knows something or is justified in believing it.

On the traditional picture, knowledge and justification are treated as purely epistemic: they depend only on truth-related factors like evidence, reliability, and coherence with other beliefs. Pragmatic encroachment challenges this by claiming that what one is rationally required to believe (or what counts as knowledge) can vary with one’s practical situation.

A central slogan is: what it takes to know can depend on what is at stake. When little depends on being right, weaker evidence may suffice for knowledge; when the stakes are high, stronger evidence may be required.

Motivating Cases and Arguments

Much of the discussion is driven by intuitive thought experiments. A widely cited pattern involves two agents with the same evidence but different stakes:

• In a low-stakes situation, an agent forms a belief (for example, that the bank will be open on Saturday) on the basis of memory or testimony. With nothing serious depending on the outcome, it seems natural to say the agent knows the bank will be open.
• In a high-stakes counterpart scenario, another agent has the same evidence but faces severe consequences (financial ruin, loss of a house) if the bank is closed. Here, many people judge that the agent does not know, and that it would be epistemically irresponsible to act on the belief without checking further.

Proponents of pragmatic encroachment argue that the best explanation of these shifting judgments is that stakes and practical interests influence knowledge itself, not just what it is prudent to do.

Another line of support comes from connections between knowledge and action. Some theorists hold that knowledge is the standard for acting rationally on a belief. If so, then the conditions for knowledge must line up with the conditions for rational action. Since rational action clearly depends on practical factors (like risk and reward), knowledge might also be partly sensitive to such factors.

Similarly, in discussions of assertion, some have suggested that one should assert a claim only if one knows it. If what it is appropriate to assert depends on the conversational context and associated costs of error, and if that standard is knowledge, then knowledge may itself be contextually or practically encroached upon.

Main Forms and Variants

Within the general idea of pragmatic encroachment, several more specific views can be distinguished. They differ on which epistemic status is affected and how practical factors do the work.

Encroachment on Knowledge

Many accounts focus on knowledge as the primary locus of encroachment. On these views, two agents can share the same evidence and cognitive situation, yet:

• In a low-stakes setting, the agent knows that p.
• In a high-stakes setting, the agent with the same evidence does not know that p.

Some authors connect this to a safety or reliability condition on knowledge: in high-stakes contexts, error possibilities that were previously ignorable now become salient or relevant, tightening the standard for when a belief counts as safe enough to be knowledge.

Encroachment on Justification or Rational Belief

Other theorists locate encroachment one step “downstream” from knowledge, in justification or rational belief rather than knowledge itself. On this approach, how justified you are in believing p can depend partly on what you stand to lose if p is false.

Here, the core idea is often framed in decision-theoretic terms: epistemic rationality cannot be sharply separated from practical rationality. If it would be seriously irrational to act as though p is true unless you have very strong evidence, then in such contexts weaker evidence does not amount to full justification.

Encroachment and Contextualism

Pragmatic encroachment is sometimes discussed alongside contextualism about knowledge attributions, but they are conceptually distinct:

• Contextualism claims that the truth-conditions of sentences like “S knows that p” vary with the attributor’s conversational context (for example, what alternatives are being considered).
• Pragmatic encroachment claims that the facts themselves about whether S knows can depend on S’s practical situation, not on who is talking about S.

Some philosophers combine these approaches; others see pragmatic encroachment as a rival to purely linguistic or semantic explanations of shifting knowledge judgments.

Objections and Ongoing Debates

Critics of pragmatic encroachment raise several main concerns.

Purism and the “Epistemic-Only” View

Defenders of a traditional or purist picture argue that knowledge and justification should be insulated from practical factors. On this view, whether one knows depends solely on epistemic items such as evidence, reliability, and truth. Practical stakes, they contend, properly bear only on what it is rational to do, not on what one knows.

Purists often claim that intuitive judgments in high-stakes cases can be explained by saying that although the subject still knows, it is no longer reasonable to act on that knowledge without further checking. The shift is thus located at the level of practical reasoning, not epistemic status.

The Mixing of Norms

A further objection is that pragmatic encroachment confuses distinct norms. Epistemic norms aim at truth; practical norms aim at good outcomes or utility. To let costs and benefits alter whether one knows seems, to some, like a category mistake—importing pragmatic standards into a domain that should be governed only by truth-based norms.

Proponents respond that the norms governing belief and knowledge may themselves be fundamentally linked to norms of action and choice, so the separation cannot be as sharp as purists suggest.

Knowledge Ascriptions and Ordinary Language

Another line of criticism questions whether the intuitive data actually support pragmatic encroachment. Some argue that our shifting judgments about whether someone “knows” in high vs. low stakes cases may reflect conversational pragmatics, expectations of caution, or politeness, rather than genuine differences in knowledge itself.

This leads to debates over how to interpret everyday knowledge ascriptions, and whether the best explanatory theory is semantic (contextualism), pragmatic (about our use of language), or metaphysical (about the nature of knowledge).

Scope and Limits of Encroachment

Among proponents, disputes continue over the extent of pragmatic encroachment:

• Does it affect only knowledge, or also justification, evidence, and rational belief?
• Are only stakes relevant, or do other practical factors (like one’s projects, moral responsibilities, or social roles) also matter?
• Is encroachment a modest adjustment at the margins of epistemic theory, or does it require a major reconfiguration of how epistemology relates to decision theory and ethics?

These questions keep pragmatic encroachment a central and evolving topic at the intersection of epistemology, philosophy of language, and the theory of rational action.