Abstract

ABSTRACT Timothy Williamson offers the ordinary practice, the lottery and the Moorean argument for the ‘knowledge account’ that assertion is the only speech-act that is governed by the single rule that one must know its content. I show that these fail to support it and that the emptiness of the knowledge account renders mysterious why breaking the knowledge rule should be a source of criticism. I argue that focussing exclusively on the sincerity of the speech-act of letting one know engenders a category mistake about the nature of constraints on assertion. After giving an analysis of assertion I propose that the norm of a type of assertion is the epistemic state one needs for one’s speech-act to succeed in being an assertion of that type and that the epistemic state in question is determined by the point of the type of assertion. One is practically irrational in violating the norm.

Highlights

  • Williamson’s Knowledge AccountWilliamson (2000) tells us that assertion is the only speech-act that is governed by the single rule that one must know its content (2000, 240–241)

  • Timothy Williamson offers the ordinary practice, the lottery and the Moorean argument for the ‘knowledge account’ that assertion is the only speech-act that is governed by the single ‘knowledge rule’ or norm, that one must know its content

  • I propose that norm of a type of assertion is the epistemic state one needs for one’s speech-act to succeed in being an assertion of that type and that the epistemic state in question is determined by the point of the type of assertion

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Summary

Williamson’s Knowledge Account

Williamson (2000) tells us that assertion is the only speech-act that is governed by the single rule that one must know its content (2000, 240–241). Williamson tells us that in articulating the knowledge rule we describe our normal practice of assertion (2000, 253) and doing so is like articulating for the first time the rules of a traditional game (2000, 239). DeRose 2002, 179), is that to assert that p is to represent oneself as knowing that p. Williamson (2000, 252, n 6) argues that this is subsumed by his knowledge account, since in doing anything for which authority is required, one represents oneself as having the authority to do it and to have the authority to assert that p is to know that p. First I turn to the emptiness of the knowledge account and the category mistake that this engenders, namely misconceiving of assertion as falling under purely epistemic norms

The Emptiness of the Knowledge Account
The Category Mistake of the Knowledge Account
The Ordinary Practice Argument and its Supporters
The Lottery Argument
The Moorean Argument
The Impropriety of Some Moorean Assertions
An Analysis of Assertion
10. Explaining the Propriety or Impropriety of Assertions
11. Types of Assertion and Their Norms
12. Concluding Remarks
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