Belief, assertion and Moore’s Paradox

In this article I argue that two received accounts of belief and assertion cannot both be correct, because they entail mutually contradictory claims about Moore’s Paradox. The two accounts in question are, first, the Action Theory of Belief (ATB), the functionalist view that belief must be manifested in dispositions to act, and second, the Belief Account of Assertion (BAA), the Gricean view that an asserter must present himself as believing what he asserts. It is generally accepted also that Moorean assertions are absurd, and that BAA explains why they are. I shall argue that ATB implies that some Moorean assertions are, in some fairly ordinary contexts, well justified. Thus BAA and ATB are mutually inconsistent. In the concluding section I explore three possible ways of responding to the dilemma, and what implications they have for the nature of the constitutive relationships linking belief, assent and behavioural dispositions.

Epistemic modals, relativism and assertion

I think that there are good reasons to adopt a relativist semantics for epistemic modal claims such as ``the treasure might be under the palm tree', according to which such utterances determine a truth value relative to something finer-grained than just a world (or a <world, time> pair). Anyone who is inclined to relativise truth to more than just worlds and times faces a problem about assertion. It's easy to be puzzled about just what purpose would be served by assertions of this kind, and how to understand what we'd be up to in our use of sentences like ``the treasure might be under the palm tree', if they have such peculiar truth conditions. After providing a very quick argument to motivate a relativist view of epistemic modals, I bring out and attempt to resolve this problem in making sense of the role of assertions with relativist truth conditions. Solving this problem should be helpful in two ways: first, it eliminates an apparently forceful objection to relativism, and second, spelling out the relativist account of assertion and communication will help to make clear just what the relativist position is, exactly, and why it's interesting. Thanks to Brian Weatherson, John Hawthorne, Daniel Stoljar, Frank Jackson, Ben Blumson, Seth Yalcin, Karen Bennett, Kent Bach, Matthew Weiner, Jonathan Kvanvig, Eric Swanson, David Chalmers, Agustin Rayo, Dustin Locke, Aaron Bronfman, Michael Allers, Ivan Mayerhofer, and to the participants at the BSPC 2005 for helpful discussion.     

The distinctive “should” of assertability

Recent work has assumed that the normativity associated with assertion differs from the normativity of morality, practical rationality, etiquette, and legality. That is, whether an assertion “should” be made is not merely a function of these other familiar sorts of normativity and is especially connected to truth. Some researchers have challenged this assumption of distinctive normativity. In this paper I report two experiments that test the assumption. Participants read a brief story, judged whether an assertion should be made, and rated several other qualities of the assertion, including its truth value, morality, rationality, etiquette, legality, and folly. Of these qualities, truth value most strongly predicted assertability. The findings support the assumption of distinctive normativity and provide further evidence that the norm of our social practice of assertion is factive (i.e., it makes truth essential to assertability).     

From Argument to Assertion

Acceptance or rejection of factual assertions is a far more important process than logical validation of arguments. Not only are assertions more persuasive than arguments; this is desirable, since we want our beliefs and actions to be reasonable and not just rational. When do we resort to argument? Real speeches heavy on arguments aim to present the speaker as calm, serious, and knowledgeable. In public life, one argues not in order to demonstrate the claim for which one is arguing, but to show that one shares the common prejudices or values that appear in the presuppositions and conclusions of one’s argument, and to demonstrate mastery of the subject matter by displaying relevant knowledge in coherently organized detail. Arguing is thus a way of presenting facts and principles so as to show one’s character as worthy of trust.     

The test of truth: An experimental investigation of the norm of assertion

Assertion is fundamental to our lives as social and cognitive beings. Philosophers have recently built an impressive case that the norm of assertion is factive. That is, you should make an assertion only if it is true. Thus far the case for a factive norm of assertion been based on observational data. This paper adds experimental evidence in favor of a factive norm from six studies. In these studies, an assertion’s truth value dramatically affects whether people think it should be made. Whereas nearly everyone agreed that a true assertion supported by good evidence should be made, most people judged that a false assertion supported by good evidence should not be made. The studies also suggest that people are consciously aware of criteria that guide their evaluation of assertions. Evidence is also presented that some intuitive support for a non-factive norm of assertion comes from a surprising tendency people have to misdescribe cases of blameless rule-breaking as cases where no rule is broken.     

Beyond Millianism

In Beyond Rigidity, Soames attempts to defend Millianism by articulating a novel account of the semantics and pragmatics of sentences containing names. Soames uses this account both to respond to the objection that Millianism unintuitively allows the unrestricted substitution of coreferential names in propositional attitude contexts, and to generate a positive argument for Millianism. I argue that the positive argument fails, and that Soames’s account of the semantics and pragmatics of sentences containing names is inconsistent with Millianism.

Knowledge and Assertion in Korean

Evidence from life science, cognitive science, and philosophy supports the hypothesis that knowledge is a central norm of the human practice of assertion. However, to date, the experimental evidence supporting this hypothesis is limited to American anglophones. If the hypothesis is correct, then such findings will not be limited to one language or culture. Instead, we should find a strong connection between knowledge and assertability across human languages and cultures. To begin testing this prediction, we conducted three experiments on Koreans in Korean. In each case, the findings replicated prior results observed in Americans and were corroborated by key findings from new replication studies on Americans using materials back‐translated from Korean. These findings support the theory that there is a core, cross‐culturally robust human practice of assertion and that, according to the rules of this practice, assertions should express knowledge.     

Knowledge,certainty, and assertion

Researchers have debated whether knowledge or certainty is a better candidate for the norm of assertion. Should you make an assertion only if you know it's true? Or should you make an assertion only if you're certain it's true? If either knowledge or certainty is a better candidate, then this will likely have detectable behavioral consequences. I report an experiment that tests for relevant behavioral consequences. The results support the view that assertability is more closely linked to knowledge than to certainty. In multiple scenarios, people were much more willing to allow assertability and certainty to come apart than to allow assertability and knowledge to come apart.     

Knowledge claims and context: loose use

There is abundant evidence of contextual variation in the use of “S knows p.” Contextualist theories explain this variation in terms of semantic hypotheses that refer to standards of justification determined by “practical” features of either the subject’s context (Hawthorne & Stanley) or the ascriber’s context (Lewis, Cohen, & DeRose). There is extensive linguistic counterevidence to both forms. I maintain that the contextual variation of knowledge claims is better explained by common pragmatic factors. I show here that one is variable strictness. “S knows p” is commonly used loosely to implicate “S is close enough to knowing p for contextually indicated purposes.” A pragmatic account may use a range of semantics, even contextualist. I use an invariant semantics on which knowledge requires complete justification. This combination meets the Moorean constraint as well as any linguistic theory should, and meets the intuition constraint much better than contextualism. There is no need for ad hoc error theories. The variation in conditions of assertability and practical rationality is better explained by variably strict constraints. It will follow that “S knows p” is used loosely to implicate that the condition for asserting “p” and using it in practical reasoning are satisfied.     

Unsafe Assertions

John Turri has recently provided two problem cases for the knowledge account of assertion (KAA) to argue for the express knowledge account of assertion (EKAA). We defend KAA by explaining away the intuitions about the problem cases and by showing that our explanation is theoretically superior to EKAA.