About this topic
Summary Philosophical discussion of norms of assertion has concentrated on whether there is a rule governing the speech act of assertion which specifies a necessary condition for making the speech act permissible on that occasion. The knowledge norm, which says that one must: assert that p only if one knows that p, has been widely defended, but rival accounts require other epistemic or alethic conditions, such as justified or reasonable belief, or that it be reasonable for one to believe, or simply that one's assertion be true. The arguments for such accounts appeal to conversational patterns and linguistic data, as well as intuitions about cases. Debate has ensued over whether there even is such a norm; whether the norm (whatever its content) is constitutive of the speech act of assertion; whether the norm has a different structure, or is flexible or context-sensitive; whether such a norm supports contextualism, or pragmatic encroachment, in epistemology; and whether meeting the norm is not only necessary but also sufficient for (epistemically) permissible assertion. Many discussions also consider whether there are related (epistemic) rules governing proper belief or properly acting on a proposition.
Key works Unger 1975 (Ch. 6) provides an early discussion, but Williamson 1996 / Williamson 2000 (Ch. 11) set the agenda for recent debates over a knowledge norm; Turri 2016 and Benton 2024 offer the most sustained defenses of the knowledge norm. Important rival accounts are offered by Weiner 2005Douven 2006Lackey 2007, McKinnon 2013 and McKinnon 2015, Pelling 2013, and Goldberg 2015. DeRose 2002 / DeRose 2009 (Ch. 3) argues from the knowledge norm to contextualism; see Turri 2010 for an intriguing reply. Pritchard & Greenough 2009, Brown & Cappelen 2011, and Littlejohn & Turri 2013 contain recent work; see also Buckwalter & Turri 2014, Pagin 2016, Benton 2016, and Benton 2019 for some recent advancements. On whether a sufficiency direction of the knowledge norm is plausible, see Brown 2010, Lackey 2011, Benton 2016, and Lackey 2016. For normative and linguistic issues related to hedged assertion, see Benton & Van Elswyk 2020.
Introductions Weiner 2007 and MacFarlane 2011 are good overviews of the topic; see also Benton 2014, especially section 1, and Benton 2024.
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  1. Belief is weak.John Hawthorne, Daniel Rothschild & Levi Spectre - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (5):1393-1404.
    It is tempting to posit an intimate relationship between belief and assertion. The speech act of assertion seems like a way of transferring the speaker’s belief to his or her audience. If this is right, then you might think that the evidential warrant required for asserting a proposition is just the same as the warrant for believing it. We call this thesis entitlement equality. We argue here that entitlement equality is false, because our everyday notion of belief is unambiguously a (...)
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  2. A Contextualist Defence of the Material Account of Indicative Conditionals.Matheus Silva - manuscript
    The material account of indicative conditionals faces a legion of counterexamples that are the bread and butter in any entry about the subject. For this reason, the material account is widely unpopular among conditional experts. I will argue that this consensus was not built on solid foundations, since these counterexamples are contextual fallacies. They ignore a basic tenet of semantics according to which when evaluating arguments for validity we need to maintain the context constant, otherwise any argumentative form can be (...)
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  3. The Big Four - Their Interdependence and Limitations.Matheus Silva - manuscript
    Four intuitions are recurrent and influential in theories about conditionals: the Ramsey’s test, the Adams’ Thesis, the Equation, and the robustness requirement. For simplicity’s sake, I call these intuitions ‘the big four’. My aim is to show that: (1) the big four are interdependent; (2) they express our inferential dispositions to employ a conditional on a modus ponens; (3) the disposition to employ conditionals on a modus ponens doesn’t have the epistemic significance that is usually attributed to it, since the (...)
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  4. Towards a Eudaimonistic Virtue Epistemology.Berit Brogaard - forthcoming - In Abrol Fairweather (ed.), Naturalizing Virtue Epistemology. Synthese Library.
  5. The Belief Norm of Academic Publishing.Wesley Buckwalter - forthcoming - Ergo.
    The belief norm of academic publishing states that researchers should believe certain claims they publish. The purpose of this paper is to defend the belief norm of academic publishing. In its defense, the advantages and disadvantages of the belief norm are evaluated for academic research and for the publication system. It is concluded that while the norm does not come without costs, academic research systemically benefits from the belief norm and that it should be counted among those that sustain the (...)
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  6. Counterevidentials.Laura Caponetto & Neri Marsili - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    Moorean constructions are famously odd: it is infelicitous to deny that you believe what you claim to be true. But what about claiming that p, only to immediately put into question your evidence in support of p? In this paper, we identify and analyse a class of quasi-Moorean constructions, which we label counterevidentials. Although odd, counterevidentials can be accommodated as felicitous attempts to mitigate one’s claim right after making it. We explore how counterevidentials differ from lexicalised mitigation operators, parentheticals, and (...)
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  7. On Predicting.Fabrizio Cariani - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    I propose an account of the speech act of prediction that denies that the contents of prediction must be about the future and illuminates the relation between prediction and assertion. My account is a synthesis of two ideas: (i) that what is in the future in prediction is the time of discovery and (ii) that, as Benton and Turri recently argued, prediction is best characterized in terms of its constitutive norms.
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  8. Strong Belief is Ordinary.Roger Clarke - forthcoming - Episteme:1-21.
    In an influential recent paper, Hawthorne, Rothschild, and Spectre (“HRS”) argue that belief is weak. More precisely: they argue that the referent of believe in ordinary language is much weaker than epistemologists usually suppose; that one needs very little evidence to be entitled to believe a proposition in this sense; and that the referent of believe in ordinary language just is the ordinary concept of belief. I argue here to the contrary. HRS identify two alleged tests of weakness – the (...)
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  9. Antisocial Modelling.Georgi Gardiner - forthcoming - In Alfano Mark, Jeroen De Ridder & Colin Klein (eds.), Social Virtue Epistemology.
    This essay replies to Michael Morreau and Erik J. Olsson’s ‘Learning from Ranters: The Effect of Information Resistance on the Epistemic Quality of Social Network Deliberation’. Morreau and Olsson use simulations to suggest that false ranters—agents who do not update their beliefs and only ever assert false claims—do not diminish the epistemic value of deliberation for other agents and can even be epistemically valuable. They argue conclude that “Our study suggests that including [false] ranters has little or no negative effect (...)
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  10. Interrogatives, inquiries, and exam questions.Grzegorz Gaszczyk - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-20.
    The speech act of inquiry is generally treated as a default kind of asking questions. The widespread norm states that one inquires whether p only if one does not know that p. However, the fact that inquiring is just one kind of asking questions has received little to no attention. Just as in the declarative mood we can perform not only assertions, but various other speech acts, like guesses or predictions, so in the interrogative mood we can also make various (...)
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  11. Prescriptive and Evaluative Norms of Assertion.Jonathan Ichikawa - forthcoming - Analysis Reviews.
    Critical notice of Christoph Kelp and Mona Simion's _Sharing Knowledge: A Functionalist Account of Assertion_.
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  12. The truth about assertion and retraction: A review of the empirical literature.Markus Kneer & Neri Marsili - forthcoming - In Alex Wiegmann (ed.), Lying, Fake News, and Bullshit.
    This chapter reviews empirical research on the rules governing assertion and retraction, with a focus on the normative role of truth. It examines whether truth is required for an assertion to be considered permissible, and whether there is an expectation that speakers retract statements that turn out to be false. Contrary to factive norms (such as the influential “knowledge norm”), empirical data suggests that there is no expectation that speakers only make true assertions. Additionally, contrary to truth-relativist accounts, there is (...)
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  13. Moore's Paradox and Assertion.Clayton Littlejohn - forthcoming - In Oxford Handbook of Assertion. Oxford University Press.
    If I were to say, “Agnes does not know that it is raining, but it is,” this seems like a perfectly coherent way of describing Agnes’s epistemic position. If I were to add, “And I don’t know if it is, either,” this seems quite strange. In this chapter, we shall look at some statements that seem, in some sense, contradictory, even though it seems that these statements can express propositions that are contingently true or false. Moore thought it was paradoxical (...)
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  14. Sharing Knowledge: A Functionalist Account of AssertionKelp, Christoph and Mona Simion, Sharing Knowledge: A Functionalist Account of Assertion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. x + 208,£75.00(hardback). [REVIEW]Tammo Lossau - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy:1.
    We say things for a reason. This is the starting point of Kelp and Simion’s book, which aims to understand assertion through its etiological function. On their view, assertion aims at the dissemina...
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  15. The Definition of Assertion: Commitment and Truth.Neri Marsili - forthcoming - Mind and Language.
    According to an influential view, asserting a proposition involves undertaking some “commitment” to the truth of that proposition. But accounts of what it is for someone to be committed to the truth of a proposition are often vague or imprecise, and are rarely put to work to define assertion. This paper aims to fill this gap. It offers a precise characterisation of assertoric commitment, and shows how it can be applied to define assertion. On the proposed view, acquiring commitment is (...)
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  16. Affermazioni e verità: fra regole e scopi.Neri Marsili - forthcoming - Rivista di Filosofia:365-395.
    There is a fundamental disagreement about which norm regulates assertion. Proponents of factive accounts argue that only true propositions are assertable, whereas proponents of non-factive accounts insist that at least some false propositions are. This paper delineates an alternative solution: to understand truth as the aim of assertion. In asserting, you describe reality as being in a certain way, and you succeed only if reality is indeed in that way. This tells us under which conditions assertions are successful, but not (...)
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  17. Truth: the rule or the aim of assertion?Neri Marsili - forthcoming - Episteme.
    Is truth the rule or the aim of assertions? Philosophers disagree. After reviewing the available evidence, the hypothesis that truth is the aim of assertion is defended against recent attempts to prove that truth is rather a rule of assertion.
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  18. What is Good Thinking? Comments on Mona Simion's Shifty Speech and Independent Thought. [REVIEW]Robin McKenna - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Mona Simion’s Shifty Speech and Independent Thought argues for epistemic independence—the independence of good thinking from practical considerations. Along the way she argues against “shifty” views of knowledge and knowledge ascriptions, as well as against those who have tried to preserve the independence of knowledge from practical considerations by accepting shifty views of the epistemic normativity of assertion. In my discussion I start by highlighting some of Simion’s main claims and reconstructing her main lines of argument. I then raise some (...)
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  19. Assertion and Rejection.Julian J. Schlöder - forthcoming - In Daniel Altshuler (ed.), Linguistics Meets Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.
    I argue that rejection is a speech act that cannot be reduced to assertion. Adapting an argument by Huw Price, I conclude that rejection is best conceived of as the speech act that is used to register that some other speech act is (or would be) violating a rule of the conversation game. This can be naturally understood as registering *norm violations* where speech acts are characterised by their essential norms. However, I argue that rejection itself is not to be (...)
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  20. Truth's Dialectical Role: From Friction to Tension.Lionel Shapiro - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper contrasts two versions of a pragmatist critique of deflationism about truth. According to the critique, understanding the practice of factual discourse requires understanding a role played in that practice by speakers’ use of the concept of truth. Huw Price takes this role to lie in the expression of attitudes of approval and disapproval toward other speakers’ assertions. Proceeding from Robert Brandom’s analysis of assertion, I defend an alternative account of truth’s role in terms of the acknowledgement and disacknowledgement (...)
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  21. Knowledge attributions and lottery cases: a review and new evidence.John Turri - forthcoming - In Igor Douven (ed.), The lottery problem. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
    I review recent empirical findings on knowledge attributions in lottery cases and report a new experiment that advances our understanding of the topic. The main novel finding is that people deny knowledge in lottery cases because of an underlying qualitative difference in how they process probabilistic information. “Outside” information is generic and pertains to a base rate within a population. “Inside” information is specific and pertains to a particular item’s propensity. When an agent receives information that 99% of all lottery (...)
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  22. Hedging and the Norm of Belief.Peter van Elswyk & Christopher Willard-Kyle - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    We argue that knowledge is not the norm of belief given that ‘I believe’ is used to hedge. We explore the consequences of this argument for the normative relationship between belief and assertion.
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  23. A Commitment-Theoretic Account of Moore's Paradox.Jack Woods - forthcoming - In An Atlas of Meaning: Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface).
    Moore’s paradox, the infamous felt bizarreness of sincerely uttering something of the form “I believe grass is green, but it ain’t”—has attracted a lot of attention since its original discovery (Moore 1942). It is often taken to be a paradox of belief—in the sense that the locus of the inconsistency is the beliefs of someone who so sincerely utters. This claim has been labeled as the priority thesis: If you have an explanation of why a putative content could not be (...)
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  24. On proper presupposition.Julia Zakkou - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    This paper investigates the norm of presupposition, as one pervasive type of indirect speech act. It argues against the view that sees presuppositions as an indirect counterpart of the direct speech act of assertion and proposes instead that they are much more similar to the direct speech act of assumption. More concretely, it suggests that the norm that governs presuppositions is not an epistemic or doxastic attitude such as knowledge, justified belief, or mere belief; it's a practical attitude, most plausibly (...)
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  25. Knowledge is the Norm of Assertion.Matthew A. Benton - 2024 - In Matthias Steup, Blake Roeber, John Turri & Ernest Sosa (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 329-339.
    Assertion is governed by an epistemic norm requiring knowledge. This idea has been hotly debated in recent years, garnering attention in epistemology, philosophy of language, and linguistics. This chapter presents and extends the main arguments in favor of the knowledge norm, from faulty conjunctions, several conversational patterns, judgments of permission, excuse, and blame, and from showing how. (Paired with a chapter by Peter J. Graham and Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen, "Knowledge is Not Our Norm of Assertion.").
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  26. Knowledge is Not Our Norm of Assertion.Peter J. Graham & Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen - 2024 - In Blake Roeber, John Turri, Matthias Steup & Ernest Sosa (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology. New York: Wiley.
    The norm of assertion, to be in force, is a social norm. What is the content of our social norm of assertion? Various linguistic arguments purport to show that to assert is to represent oneself as knowing. But to represent oneself as knowing does not entail that assertion is governed by a knowledge norm. At best these linguistic arguments provide indirect support for a knowledge norm. Furthermore, there are alternative, non-normative explanations for the linguistic data (as in recent work from (...)
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  27. Assertion: The Constitutive Rule Account and the Engagement Condition Objection.Felix Bräuer - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (6):2259–2276.
    Many philosophers, following Williamson (The Philosophical Review 105(4): 489–523, 1996), Williamson (Knowledge and its Limits, Oxford, Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2000), subscribe to the constitutive rule account of assertion (CRAA). They hold that the activity of asserting is constituted by a single constitutive rule of assertion. However, in recent work, Maitra (in: Brown & Cappelen (ed). Assertion: new philosophical essays, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011), Johnson (Acta Analytica 33(1): 51–67, 2018), and Kelp and Simion (Synthese 197(1): 125–137, 2020a), Kelp and (...)
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  28. Assertion and Certainty.Alexander Dinges - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1):169-186.
    Assertions have a curious relationship to certainty. On the one hand, it seems clear that we can assert many everyday propositions while not being absolutely certain about them. On the other hand, it seems odd to say things like ‘p, but I am not absolutely certain that p’. In this paper, I aim to solve this conundrum. I suggest a pretense theory of assertion, according to which assertions of p are proposals to act as if the conversational participants were absolutely (...)
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  29. Helping Others to Understand: A Normative Account of the Speech Act of Explanation.Grzegorz Gaszczyk - 2023 - Topoi 42 (2):385-396.
    This paper offers a normative account of the speech act of explanation with understanding as its norm. The previous accounts of the speech act of explanation rely on the factive notion of understanding and maintain that proper explanations require knowledge. I argue, however, that such accounts are too demanding and do not reflect the everyday practice of explanation and the attribution of understanding. Instead, I argue that the non-factive, objectual attitude of understanding is sufficient for a proper explanation. On the (...)
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  30. Norms of Constatives.Grzegorz Gaszczyk - 2023 - Acta Analytica 38 (3):517-536.
    According to the normative approach, speech acts are governed by certain norms. Interestingly, the same is true for classes of speech acts. This paper considers the normative treatment of constatives, consisting of such classes as assertives, predictives, suggestives, and more. The classical approach is to treat these classes of illocutions as species of constatives. Recently, however, Simion (Shifty Speech and Independent Thought: Epistemic Normativity in Context, Oxford University Press, 2021) has proposed that all constatives (i) are species of assertion, and (...)
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  31. Constitutive Rules and Internal Criticism of Assertion.Jaakko Reinikainen - 2023 - In Panu Raatikainen (ed.), Essays in the Philosophy of Language. Helsinki: Acta Philosophica Fennica. pp. 301-315.
    Timothy Williamson famously argued that assertion is constituted either by the knowledge rule or some similar epistemic rule. If true, the proposal has important implications for criticism of assertions. If assertions are analogical to other rule-constituted kinds like games, we can criticize assertions either on external or internal grounds, depending on whether the criticism draws from the necessary norms of assertion or some contingent ones. More recently, authors like Goldberg and MacFarlane have argued against other theories of assertion on the (...)
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  32. Assertion remains strong.Peter van Elswyk & Matthew A. Benton - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (1):27-50.
    Assertion is widely regarded as an act associated with an epistemic position. To assert is to represent oneself as occupying this position and/or to be required to occupy this position. Within this approach, the most common view is that assertion is strong: the associated position is knowledge or certainty. But recent challenges to this common view present new data that are argued to be better explained by assertion being weak. Old data widely taken to support assertion being strong has also (...)
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  33. A Credibility-Backed Norm for Testimony.Matt Weiner - 2023 - Episteme 20 (1):73-85.
    I propose that testimony is subject to a norm that is backed by a credibility sanction: whenever the norm is violated, it is appropriate for the testifier to lose some credibility for their future testimony. This is one of a family of sanction-based norms, where violation of the norm makes it appropriate to lose some power; in this case, the power to induce belief through testimony. The applicability of the credibility norm to testimony follows from the epistemology of testimony, in (...)
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  34. Science, assertion, and the common ground.Corey Dethier - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-19.
    I argue that the appropriateness of an assertion is sensitive to context—or, really, the “common ground”—in a way that hasn’t previously been emphasized by philosophers. This kind of context-sensitivity explains why some scientific conclusions seem to be appropriately asserted even though they are not known, believed, or justified on the available evidence. I then consider other recent attempts to account for this phenomenon and argue that if they are to be successful, they need to recognize the kind of context-sensitivity that (...)
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  35. Norms of Speech Acts.Grzegorz Gaszczyk - 2022 - Studia Semiotyczne 36 (11):45-56.
    This paper offers a systematic classification and characterization of speech acts and their norms. Recently, the normative approach has been applied to various speech acts, most notably to constatives. I start by showing how the work on the norms of assertion has influenced various approaches to the norms of other speech acts. I focus on the fact that various norms of assertion have different extensions, i.e., they denote different clusters of illocutions as belonging to an assertion. I argue that this (...)
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  36. Introduction to 'Scientific Testimony: Its roles in science and society'.Mikkel Gerken - 2022 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    This is the Introduction and Chapter 1.1 of the book ‘Scientific Testimony. Its roles in science and society’ (OUP 2022). The introduction contains a brief survey of the book’s chapters and main conclusions, which I hope will be useful to the curious ones.
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  37. Thinking and being sure.Jeremy Goodman & Ben Holguín - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (3):634-654.
    How is what we believe related to how we act? That depends on what we mean by ‘believe’. On the one hand, there is what we're sure of: what our names are, where we were born, whether we are sitting in front of a screen. Surety, in this sense, is not uncommon — it does not imply Cartesian absolute certainty, from which no possible course of experience could dislodge us. But there are many things that we think that we are (...)
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  38. Assertion and the “How do you know?” challenge.Eliran Haziza - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-17.
    One of the central arguments for the knowledge norm of assertion appeals to the fact that it is typically legitimate to respond to an assertion with “How do you know?”, intended as a challenge to the assertion. The legitimacy of the challenge is taken as evidence in favor of the idea that permissible assertion requires knowledge. In this paper, I argue that if the legitimacy of “How do you know?” challenges supports a knowledge norm for assertion, it also supports the (...)
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  39. Knowledge of Future Contingents.Andrea Iacona - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (2):447-467.
    This paper addresses the question whether future contingents are knowable, that is, whether one can know that things will go a certain way even though it is possible that things will not go that way. First I will consider a long-established view that implies a negative answer, and draw attention to some endemic problems that affect its credibility. Then I will sketch an alternative line of thought that prompts a positive answer: future contingents are knowable, although our epistemic access of (...)
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  40. You ought to have known: positive epistemic norms in a knowledge-first framework.Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-23.
    There are two central kinds of epistemological mistakes: believing things you shouldn’t, and failing to believe things that you should. The knowledge-first program offers a canonical explanation for the former: if you believe something without knowing it, you violate the norm to believe only that which you know. But the explanation does not extend in any plausible way to a story about what’s wrong with suspending judgment when one ought to believe. In this paper I explore prospects for a knowledge-centering (...)
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  41. How to Study Worlds: Or why one should (not) care about methodology.Poul F. Kjaer - 2022 - In Marija Bartl & Jessica C. Lawrence (eds.), The Politics of European Legal Research: Behind the Method. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. pp. 208 - 2022.
    This chapter advances a twofold analytical strategy. Firstly, an extrapolation of the legal method, i.e. the application of general rules to particular cases, into a general tool for both description and problem solving. Secondly, through the integration of the legal method with a phenomenological approach for the study of social worlds. This provides the basis for an integrated approach potentially deployable in relation to all social phenomena at the micro, meso and macro levels. This makes it an alternative to the (...)
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  42. "Knowledge First" and Its Limits.Tammo Lossau - 2022 - Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University
    I discuss three understandings of the idea of “Knowledge First Epistemology”, i.e. Timothy Williamson’s suggestion that we should take knowledge as a starting point, rather than trying to analyze it. Some have taken this to be a suggestion about the role of the concept of knowledge, but Williamson also seems to be concerned with intuition-based metaphysics. As an alternative, I develop the idea that knowledge may be a social kind that can be understood through a functional analysis in the tradition (...)
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  43. Assertion is weak.Matthew Mandelkern & Kevin Dorst - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22.
    Recent work has argued that belief is weak: the level of rational credence required for belief is relatively low. That literature has contrasted belief with assertion, arguing that the latter requires an epistemic state much stronger than (weak) belief---perhaps knowledge or even certainty. We argue that this is wrong: assertion is just as weak as belief. We first present a variety of new arguments for this, and then show that the standard arguments for stronger norms are not convincing. Finally, we (...)
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  44. Assertion, Evidence, and the Future.Dilip Ninan - 2022 - Philosophical Review 131 (4):405-451.
    This essay uses a puzzle about assertion and time to explore the pragmatics, semantics, and epistemology of future discourse. The puzzle concerns cases in which a subject is in a position to say, at an initial time t, that it will be that ϕ, but is not in a position to say, at a later time t′, that it is or was that ϕ, despite not losing or gaining any relevant evidence between t and t′. We consider a number of (...)
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  45. People, posts, and platforms: reducing the spread of online toxicity by contextualizing content and setting norms.Isaac Record & Boaz Miller - 2022 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (2):1-19.
    We present a novel model of individual people, online posts, and media platforms to explain the online spread of epistemically toxic content such as fake news and suggest possible responses. We argue that a combination of technical features, such as the algorithmically curated feed structure, and social features, such as the absence of stable social-epistemic norms of posting and sharing in social media, is largely responsible for the unchecked spread of epistemically toxic content online. Sharing constitutes a distinctive communicative act, (...)
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  46. Two accounts of assertion.Martin Smith - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-18.
    In this paper I will compare two competing accounts of assertion: the knowledge account and the justified belief account. When it comes to the evidence that is typically used to assess accounts of assertion – including the evidence from lottery propositions, the evidence from Moore’s paradoxical propositions and the evidence from conversational patterns – I will argue that the justified belief account has at least as much explanatory power as its rival. I will argue, finally, that a close look at (...)
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  47. Certainty and Assertion.Jacques-Henri Vollet - 2022 - Dialectica 999 (1).
    It is widely held that assertions are partially governed by an epistemic norm. But what is the epistemic condition set out in the norm? Is it knowledge, truth, belief, or something else? In this paper, I defend a view similar to that of Stanley (2008), according to which the relevant epistemic condition is epistemic certainty, where epistemic certainty (but not knowledge) is context-sensitive. I start by distinguishing epistemic certainty, subjective certainty, and knowledge. Then, I explain why it's much more plausible (...)
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  48. Self-Knowledge Requirements and Moore's Paradox.David James Barnett - 2021 - Philosophical Review 130 (2):227-262.
    Is self-knowledge a requirement of rationality, like consistency, or means-ends coherence? Many claim so, citing the evident impropriety of asserting, and the alleged irrationality of believing, Moore-paradoxical propositions of the form < p, but I don't believe that p>. If there were nothing irrational about failing to know one's own beliefs, they claim, then there would be nothing irrational about Moore-paradoxical assertions or beliefs. This article considers a few ways the data surrounding Moore's paradox might be marshaled to support rational (...)
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  49. The Descriptive, the Normative, and the Entanglement of Values in Science.Matthew J. Brown - 2021 - In Heather Douglas & Ted Richards (eds.), Science, Values, and Democracy: The 2016 Descartes Lectures. Tempe, AZ, and Washington, DC: Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes, Arizona State University. pp. 51-65.
    Heather Douglas has helped to set the standard for twenty-first century discussions in philosophy of science on the topics of values in science and science in democracy. Douglas’s work has been part of a movement to bring the question of values in science back to center of the field and to focus especially on policy-relevant science. This first chapter, on the pervasive entanglement of science and values, includes an improved and definitive statement of the argument from inductive risk, which she (...)
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  50. The Modal Future: A Theory of Future-Directed Thought and Talk.Fabrizio Cariani - 2021 - Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
    Provisional draft, pre-production copy of my book “The Modal Future” (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press).
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