Abstract
Unlike first-person Moorean sentences, it’s not always awkward to assert, “p, but you don’t know that p.” This can seem puzzling: after all, one can never get one’s audience to know the asserted content by speaking thus. Nevertheless, such assertions can be conversationally useful, for instance, by helping speaker and addressee agree on where to disagree. I will argue that such assertions also make trouble for the growing family of views about the norm of assertion that what licenses proper assertion is not the initiating epistemic position of the speaker but the (potential) resulting epistemic position of the audience.
Highlights
Assertion is our most straightforward practice for informing others about the world
Since Williamson (2000), some philosophers have thought that part of the story involves assertion being subject to a special, epistemic norm—at least a norm that applies to assertions that are straight-faced and unhedged, B Christopher Willard-Kyle christopher.willard-kyle@glasgow.ac.uk
The same Williamsonian (2000) explanation can explain the awkwardness of both sentences: neither conjunction can be known by the agent who asserts the proposition expressed by a first-person Moorean sentence
Summary
Assertion is our most straightforward practice for informing others about the world. To assert that p is (at least) to say a sentence that expresses p (in the given context) in the right sort of way. For instance, that one cannot put someone in a position to know that they’ve lost the lottery on merely probabilistic grounds.8 They get the right verdict in Lackey’s selfless assertion cases, since none of the norms requires any particular doxastic attitude in the speaker. Asserting, for example, “p, but I don’t believe that p” would never generate knowledge that p in one’s audience, since one would always be giving them a defeater for p along with the testimony that p.11,12 These audience-centric norms get the right verdicts in the cases that have most vexed the speaker-centric literature. Such expressions sometimes have an air of self-defeating futility, many second-person variants of Moorean sentences sound perfectly acceptable Taken together, these observations give us a good reason to reject audience-centric norms of assertion.
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