When factives fail to be factives

Abstract There are many relations that are popularly believed to be factive. Knowing, seeing, reason why, explanation, showing, and proving are a non-exhaustive list of such relations. But, famously, Allan Hazlett provided examples of felicitous sentences that picked out some of these relations and seem to suggest that these relations are non-factive. More recently, Jacob Nebel has challenged the factivity of reason why for similar reasons. And it’s not hard to generate these kinds of cases for factive relations that these authors do not explicitly consider. If they are right, this threatens to undermine significant portions of philosophical theorizing across many different areas of philosophy. My aim in this paper is to provide a unified, factivity-preserving explanation of what makes these apparent factivity violations felicitous, an explanation that itself presupposes that these relations are factive. My hope is that, in doing so, I will provide philosophers with a general way to resist these kinds of challenges. I begin by arguing that Nebel’s and Hazlett’s cases, along with the cases I present, ought to be seen as different instances of a single problem. I then argue that, despite the existence of these cases, we still have compelling reason to think these relations are factive. I then present my explanation of the apparent violations and reply to important objections to the account.