Theory:

We of the jury may wish to ignore [a particular possibility], and wish it had not been mentioned. If we ignored it now, we would bend the rules of cooperative conversation; but we may have good reason to do exactly that. […] We would ignore the far-fetched possibility if we could—but can we? Perhaps at first our attempted ignoring would be make-believe ignoring, or self-deceptive ignoring; later, perhaps, it might ripen into genuine ignoring.1

Practise:

P: Then a reviewer was upset that we wrongly described S’s position when we called him an “externalist”.

M: That reviewer was S himself, but we’re not supposed to know that.

[… some time passes …]

P: So I’m not sure that the reviewer, or indeed S himself, would agree with that.2

Notes:

  1. David Lewis, “Elusive Knowledge”; Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74:4 (1996): pp. 549–567. [↪]
  2. Two colleagues discussing predecessors of our paper-in-progress. [↪]