According to a Moorean response to skepticism, the standards for knowledge are invariantly comparatively low, and we can know across contexts all that we ordinarily take ourselves to know. It is incumbent upon the Moorean to defend his position by explaining how, in contexts in which S seems to lack knowledge, S can nevertheless have knowledge. The explanation proposed here relies on a warranted-assertability maneuver: Because we are warranted in asserting that S doesn’t know that p, it (...) can seem that S does in fact lack that piece of knowledge. Moreover, this warranted-assertability maneuver is unique and better than similar maneuvers because it makes use of H. P. Grice’s general conversational rule of Quantity—“Do not make your contribution more informative than is required”—in explaining why we are warranted in asserting that S doesn’t know that p. (shrink)

Contextualists such as Cohen and DeRose claim that the truth conditions of knowledge attributions vary contextually, in particular that the strength of epistemic position required for one to be truly ascribed knowledge depends on features of the attributor's context. Contextualists support their view by appeal to our intuitions about when it's correct (or incorrect) to ascribe knowledge. Someone might argue that some of these intuitions merely reflect when it is conversationally appropriate to ascribe knowledge, not when knowledge is truly ascribed, (...) and so try to accommodate these intuitions even on an invariantist view. DeRose (Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, 1998; Philosophical Review, 2002) argues that any such 'warranted assertibility manoeuvre', or 'WAM', against contextualism is unlikely to succeed. Here, I argue that his objections to a WAM against contextualism are not persuasive and offer a pragmatic account of the data about ascriptions of knowledge. (shrink)

Crispin Wright has argued that truth and warranted assertibility are coincident but non-co-extensive norms of assertoric practice and that this fact tends to inflate deflationary theories of truth. Wright’s inflationary argument has generated much discussion in the literature. By contrast, relatively little has been said about the claim that truth and warranted assertibility are coincident norms. This paper will examine that claim. Wright’s argument for the claim that truth and warranted assertibility are coincident norms is first clearly (...) presented. It is then suggested that the argument trades on an ambiguity in ‘justified’ and ‘warrantedly assertible’. Finally, it is argued that, once the ambiguity is removed, there is reason to reject the claim that truth and epistemic warrant are coincident norms of assertoric practice. One important result is that no epistemic theory of truth can satisfy what Wright takes to be a platitude about assertion. (shrink)

This article defends a pragmatic conception of objectivity for the moral domain. I begin by contextualizing pragmatic approaches to objectivity and discuss at some length one of the most interesting proposals in this area, Cheryl Misak's conception of pragmatic objectivity. My general argument is that in order to defend a pragmatic approach to objectivity, the pragmatic stance should be interpreted in more radical terms than most contemporary proposals do. I suggest in particular that we should disentangle objectivity from truth, and (...) I claim that moral inquiry is in most cases responsive to a normative standard that is closer to warranted assertibility than to truth. Using an argument that relies partly on Huw Price's account of forms of normative assertion, I will show that a practice-based account of warranted assertibility does the epistemic work required to defend objectivity while avoiding exposure to the criticisms that are usually addressed against this notion. (shrink)

Abstract: In responding to the cases that motivate epistemic contextualism, invariantists sometimes use a warranted assertability maneuver (WAM), according to which we mistakenly judge an assertion to be true because we confuse conversational propriety with truth. I argue that no invariantist WAM against Stewart Cohen's Airport Case can succeed. The problem is that such a WAM is inconsistent with the known ways of accounting for the evidence that motivates the knowledge account of assertion.

Dewey defines knowledge as the outcome of competent inquiry. but knowledge is for dewey fundamentally predictive. this gives rise to a difficulty: should the course of nature change, a man might both know something (having carried out the relevant inquiry) and not know it (his relevant predictions being false). this difficulty is set out formally, and a solution is proposed in terms of dewey's concept of warranted assertibility.

Attributer contextualists maintain that the verb 'knows' is context-sensitive in the sense that the truth conditions of a sentence of the form "S knows that p" can be dependent upon the ascriber's context. One natural objection against attributer contextualism is that it confuses the impropriety of certain assertions which ascribe knowledge to agents with the falsity of those assertions. In an influential article, Keith DeRose has defended attributer contextualism against this charge by proposing constraints on what he calls "warranted (...) assertibility manoeuvres" of this sort. This paper argues that, contra DeRose, the warranted assertibility manoeuvre directed at attributer contextualism is able to meet the constraints that DeRose lays down. (shrink)

Contextualists offer "high-low standards" practical cases to show that a variety of knowledge standards are in play in different ordinary contexts. These cases show nothing of the sort, I maintain. However Keith DeRose gives an ingenious argument that standards for knowledge do go up in high-stakes cases. According to the knowledge account of assertion (Kn), only knowledge warrants assertion. Kn combined with the context sensitivity of assertability yields contextualism about knowledge. But is Kn correct? I offer a rival account (...) of warranted assertion and argue that it beats Kn as a response to the "knowledge" version of Moore's Paradox. (shrink)

Jessica Brown effectively contends that Keith DeRose’s latest argument for contextualism fails to rule out contextualism’s chief rival, namely, classic invariantism. Still, even if her position has not been ruled out, the classic invariantist must offer considerations in favor of her position if she is to convince us that it is superior to contextualism. Brown defends classic invariantism with a warranted assertability maneuver that utilizes a linguistic pragmatic principle of relevance. I argue, however, that this maneuver is not (...) as effective as it might be. I propose a different warranted assertability maneuver—one that utilizes a pragmatic principle of strength—that affords a more successful defense of classic invariantism, and that helps to establish that classic invariantism is superior to contextualism. (shrink)

All parties to the proceedings that follow concur with DS. The question is whether there is anything more to truth than can be gleaned from DS alone. Deflationism holds that there is nothing more to truth than this. Now it would appear that 'warrantedly assertible' can play the role of T in DS. Hence it would appear that the deflationist would be able to identify truth with warranted assertibility.

Against contextualism, Duncan Pritchard has argued that conversational pragmatics give rise to an argument in favour of invariantist neoMooreanism. More specifically, he argues that when we conjoin a Moorean view with a warranted assertability manoeuvre, we can satisfy our pretheoretical intuitions (which are decidedly invariantist), whereas contextualists cannot. In the following paper, I challenge Pritchard’s argument and contend that he is too quick to declare victory for invariantism, for not only does the WAM he employs appear to be (...) ad hoc vis-à-vis DeRose’s plausible criteria, but it also seems to have very implausible pragmatic implications when subjected to close scrutiny. (shrink)

A standard objection to the suggestion that the fundamental norm of assertion is the truth norm (i.e., one must not assert p unless p) is that this norm cannot explain why warrant requires knowledge-level evidence. In a recent paper, Whiting has defended the truth-first approach to the norms of assertion by appeal to a distinction between the warrant there is to assert and the warrant one has to assert. I shall argue that this latest defensive strategy is unsuccessful.

Shapiro and Taschek have argued that simply using intuitionistic logic and its Heyting semantics, one can show that there are no gaps in warranted assertability. That is, given that a discourse is faithfully modeled using Heyting's semantics for the logical constants, then if a statement _S is not warrantedly assertable, its negation (superscript box) _S is. Tennant has argued for this conclusion on similar grounds. I show that these arguments fail, albeit in illuminating ways. An appeal to constructive (...) logic does not commit one to this strong epistemological thesis, but appeals to semantics of intuitionistic logic none the less do give us certain conclusions about the connections between warranted assertability and truth. (edited). (shrink)

In a number of papers, Keith DeRose articulates his reasons for thinking that we cannot plausibly explain the mechanics of knowledge attribution in terms of varying conditions of warranted assertability (1998, 2002). His reasoning is largely comparative: “know,” he argues, proves a poor candidate for such a diagnosis when compared to other terms to which such warranted assertabilility maneuvers (i.e., WAMs) clearly apply. More specifically, DeRose aims, through to use of such comparative case studies, to identify several (...) general principles through which we might determine when WAMs are called for. In what follows, I take issue with one of these principles and argue that DeRose’s efforts to deploy the others to pro-contextualist (i.e., anti-invariantist) ends are misguided. I conclude by examining DeRose’s specific objection to Unger’s skeptical invariantism, and identify a problematic feature of his recurrent appeals to linguistic intuition. The payoff of this is an enhanced appreciation of the factors on which the contextualist/invariantist dispute should be seen to turn. (shrink)

Crispin Wright has argued that an antirealist should not equate truth with warrant. Neil Tennant has disputed this. This paper continues the discussion with Tennant. Firstly, it expands upon the radical difference between Tennant's conception of a warrant and Wright's. Secondly, it shows that, even if we were to adopt Tennant's own conception of a warrant, there is a reading available to Wright of 'There is no warrant for P' and of 'There is a warrant for not-P' such that the (...) latter does not follow from the former, as Wright claimed. Finally, it is shown that, pace Tennant, superassertibility does have a role to play in Tennant's own conception of a warrant. (shrink)

Cet article soulève la question de savoir si le réaliste sémantique doit soutenir le principe selon lequel : (R) toute raison de penser qu’un énoncé est vrai est une raison de penser que l’énoncé est soutenable de manière garantie. A l’inverse de ce qui est proposé par W. Alston, qui dit que l’acceptation de (R) impose l’identification de l’extension du « vrai » et du « soutenable de manière garantie », l’article soutient que (R) peut être dérivé de l’hypothèse neutre (...) entre le réalisme et l’antiréalisme selon laquelle il faut accepter toute illustration par des exemples non-pathologiques du schéma d’équivalence ES (il est vrai que p ssi p) pour comprendre le prédicat « vrai ». En outre, l’article argumente en faveur de la thèse selon laquelle le réaliste a des motivations positives pour accepter (R), car ce principe est la prémisse d’un argument très général pour la thèse que la signification d’un énoncé ne peut pas être donnée par les conditions dans lesquelles l’énoncé est soutenable. (shrink)

Contextualists and pragmatists agree that knowledge-denying sentences are contextually variable, in the sense that a knowledge-denying sentence might semantically express a false proposition in one context and a true proposition in another context, without any change in the properties traditionally viewed as necessary for knowledge. Minimalists deny both pragmatism and contextualism, and maintain that knowledge-denying sentences are not contextually variable. To defend their view from cases like DeRose and Stanley's high stakes bank case, minimalists like Patrick Rysiew, Jessica Brown, and (...) Wayne Davis forward ‘warranted assertability maneuvers.’ The basic idea is that some knowledge-denying sentence seems contextually variable because we mistake what a speaker pragmatically conveys by uttering that sentence for what she literally says by uttering that sentence. In this paper, I raise problems for the warranted assertability maneuvers of Rysiew, Brown, and Davis, and then present a warranted assertability maneuver that should succeed if any warranted assertability maneuver will succeed. I then show how my warranted assertability maneuver fails, and how the problem with my warranted assertability maneuver generalizes to pragmatic responses in general. The upshot of my argument is that, in order to defend their view from cases like DeRose and Stanley's high stakes bank case, minimalists must prioritize the epistemological question whether the subjects in those cases know over linguistic questions about the pragmatics of various knowledge-denying sentences. (shrink)

This book is about the norms of the speech act of assertion. This is a topic of lively contemporary debate primarily carried out in epistemology and philosophy of language. Suppose that you ask me what time an upcoming meeting starts, and I say, “4 p.m.” I’ve just asserted that the meeting starts at 4 p.m. Whenever we make claims like this, we’re asserting. The central question here is whether we need to know what we say, and, relatedly, whether what we (...) assert must be true. If the meeting is really at 3:30 p.m., you’ll be late, and probably rather upset that I told you the wrong time. In some sense, it seems like I’m on the hook for having said something false. This sense that I’ve done something wrong suggests that there are certain standards of evaluating assertions: a way of distinguishing between good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate. We call these standards norms. And so the debate about what, if any, norms govern the linguistic practice of assertion is known as the norms of assertion debate. When one’s assertion satisfies the norm, we say that the assertion is warranted. -/- Various philosophers have typically focused their views of the norms of assertion on articulating the level of epistemic support required for properly asserting. Some argue, for example, that one must know what one asserts. Others argue that one merely needs to justifiably believe what one asserts–an epistemic standing weaker than knowledge. The purpose of this book is to defend what I propose as the central norm governing our practice of assertion, which I call the Supportive Reasons Norm. Here’s what it looks like: -/- One may assert that p only if: One has supportive reasons for p, The relevant conventional and pragmatic elements of the context are present, and One asserts that p at least in part because the assertion that p satisfies and. -/- In rough outline, the standards for warrantedly asserting shift with changes in context, although knowledge is never required for warrantedly asserting. In fact, in some special contexts, speakers may warrantedly lie. This latter feature particularly sets apart my view from others in the debate. This also means that truth, knowledge, and even belief aren’t necessary conditions for warrantedly asserting. (shrink)

This paper fortifies and defends the so called Sufficiency Argument (SA) against Classical Invariantism. In Sect. 2,I explain the version of the SA formulated but then rejected by Brown (2008a). In Sect. 3, I show how cases described by Hawthorne (2004), Brown (2008b), and Lackey (forthcoming) threaten to undermine one or the other of the SA's least secure premises. In Sect. 4,I buttress one of those premises and defend the reinforced SA from the objection developed in Sect. 3.

Scientists, philosophers, and other researchers commonly assert their theories. This is surprising, as there are good reasons for skepticism about theories in cutting-edge research. I propose a new account of assertion in research contexts that vindicates these assertions. This account appeals to a distinct propositional attitude called endorsement, which is the rational attitude of committed advocacy researchers have to their theories. The account also appeals to a theory of conversational pragmatics known as the Question Under Discussion model, or QUD. Hence, (...) I call the theory the EQUD model. Motivating this account is a recognition that the speech act of assertion has two roles to play in research contexts. The first is the advocacy role, in which researchers assert a theory in order to advocate for it. The second is the evidential role, which is used to add to the common stock of information available to a field of inquiry. The EQUD model provides an account of warranted assertion for both these roles in research contexts. This success provides support for the theory of endorsement. It also provides support for information updating accounts of assertion. (shrink)

Lackey’s (2007) class of “selfless assertions” is controversial in at least two respects: it allows propositions that express Moorean absurdity to be asserted warrantedly, and it challenges the orthodox view that the speaker’s belief is a necessary condition for warranted assertibility. With regard to the former point, I critically examine Lackey’s broadly Gricean treatment of Moorean absurdity and McKinnon’s (2015) epistemic approach. With regard to the latter point, I defend the received view by supporting the knowledge account, on which (...) knowledge is the necessary condition for warranted assertion. After examining two defenses of KA, by Montminy and Turri, I propose two alternative approaches. Although I remain neutral between them, I develop in more detail the view which classifies “selfless assertions” as “presentations”, a type of assertives distinct from genuine assertions. This account is motivated further by allowing for the expansion of the normative approach to other assertives, a feature we may be interested in, in the light of a recent wave of normative accounts of speech acts. (shrink)

We show that the contemporary debate surrounding the question “What is the norm of assertion?” presupposes what we call the quantitative view, i.e. the view that this question is best answered by determining how much epistemic support is required to warrant assertion. We consider what Jennifer Lackey ( 2010 ) has called cases of isolated second-hand knowledge and show—beyond what Lackey has suggested herself—that these cases are best understood as ones where a certain type of understanding , rather than knowledge, (...) constitutes the required epistemic credential to warrant assertion. If we are right that understanding (and not just knowledge) is the epistemic norm for a restricted class of assertions, then this straightforwardly undercuts not only the widely supposed quantitative view, but also a more general presupposition concerning the universalisability of some norm governing assertion—the presumption (almost entirely unchallenged since Williamson’s 1996 paper) that any epistemic norm that governs some assertions should govern assertions—as a class of speech act—uniformly. (shrink)

Epistemologists can be divided into two camps: those who think that nothing short of certainty or (subjective) probability 1 can warrant assertion and those who disagree with this claim. This paper addressed this issue by inquiring into the problem of setting the probability threshold required for assertion in such a way that that the social epistemic good is maximized, where the latter is taken to be the veritistic value in the sense of Goldman (Knowledge in a social world, 1999). We (...) provide a Bayesian model of a test case involving a community of inquirers in a social network engaged in group deliberation regarding the truth or falsity of a proposition $p.$ p . Results obtained by means of computer simulation indicate that the certainty rule is optimal in the limit of inquiry and communication but that a lower threshold is preferable in less idealized cases. (shrink)

According to a widely held view of assertion and belief, they are each governed by a tacitly acknowledged epistemic norm, and the norm on assertion and norm on belief are so related that believing p is epistemically permissible only if asserting it is. I call it the Same Norm View. A very common type of utterance raises a puzzle for this view, viz. utterances in which we say ‘I believe p' to convey somehow guarded affirmation of the proposition that p. (...) For example, one might respond to a query for directions to the station by saying ‘I believe it is down the first street on your left.' Often, when we reply in this way, it would have been pragmatically preferable simply to assert that p, had we been epistemically warranted in doing so. One's guarded reply thus suggests one is not so warranted. Nevertheless, if one believes what one, at face value, says one believes, one believes p. Contrary to what might seem to be suggested by the Same Norm View, one does not seem to portray oneself as irrational or epistemically beyond the pale in replying in this way. The paper develops this puzzle in detail, and examines a variety of options for a resolving it consistently with the Same Norm view. The most promising of these options, I argue, is to see ‘I believe' guarded affirmations as a form merely approximately correct speech. They would, though, be a form of such speech that interestingly differs from paradigm cases of loose use or conventional hyperbole in that speakers would be comparatively unaware of engaging in approximation. I conclude ‘I believe’—guarded affirmations either show the Same Norm View to be false or must be recognised as such an interestingly distinctive form of merely approximately correct speech. (shrink)

Assertions are speech acts by means of which we express beliefs. As such they are at the heart of our linguistic and social practices. Recent research has focused extensively on the question whether the speech act of assertion is governed by norms, and if so, under what conditions it is acceptable to make an assertion. Standard theories propose, for instance, that one should only assert that p if one knows that p (the knowledge account), or that one should only assert (...) that p if p is true (the truth account). In a series of four experiments, this question is addressed empirically. Contrary to previous findings, knowledge turns out to be a poor predictor of assertability, and the norm of assertion is not factive either. The studies here presented provide empirical evidence in favour of the view that a speaker is warranted to assert that p only if her belief that p is justified. (shrink)

In this paper I present my proposal for the central norm governing the practice of assertion, which I call the Supportive Reasons Norm of Assertion (SRNA). The critical features of this norm are that it's highly sensitive to the context of assertion, such that the requirements for warrantedly asserting a proposition shift with changes in context, and that truth is not a necessary condition for warrantedly asserting. In fact, I argue that there are some cases where a speaker may warrantedly (...) assert something she knows to be false. Only SRNA seems able to account for such cases. (shrink)

This paper addresses how the anonymity of an assertion affects the epistemological dimension of its production by speakers, and its reception by hearers. After arguing that anonymity does have implications in both respects, I go on to argue that at least some of these implications derive from a warranted diminishment in speakers' and hearers' expectations of one another when there are few mechanisms for enforcing the responsibilities attendant to speech. As a result, I argue, anonymous assertions do not carry (...) the same of the speaker's relevant epistemic authoritativeness that ordinary assertions do. If this is correct, the phenomenon of anonymity provides us with a lesson regarding ordinary assertions: their aptness for engendering belief in others, and so for communicating knowledge, depends in general on the very publicness of the act of assertion itself. (shrink)

In this short paper, I compare and contrast the kind of symmetric treatment of negation favoured in different ways by Huw Price (in “Why ‘Not’?”) and by me (in “Multiple Conclusions”) with Robert Brandom’s analysis of scorekeeping in terms of commitment, entitlement and incompatibility. Both kinds of account are what Brandom calls a normative pragmatics. They are both semantic anti-realist accounts of meaning in the significance of vocabulary is explained in terms of our rule-governed (normative) practice (pragmatics). These accounts differ (...) from intuitionist semantic anti-realism by providing a way to distinguish the inferential significance of “A” and “A is warranted.” Although proof plays a central role, in neither accont is verification the primary bearer of meaning. Our accounts make these distinctions in terms of a subtle analysis of our practices. On the one hand according to Price and me, we assert as well as deny; on the other, Brandom distingushes downstream commitments from upstream entitlements and the notion of incompatibility definable in terms of these. In this paper I will examine a number connections between these different approaches, and end with a discussion of the kind of account of proof that might emerge from these considerations. (shrink)

Assertions are praised as true, informative, relevant, sincere, warranted, well-phrased, or polite. They are criticized as false, uninformative, irrelevant, insincere, unwarranted, ill-phrased, or rude. Sometimes they deserve such praise or criticism. If any respect in which performances of an act can deserve praise or criticism is a norm for that act, then the speech act of assertion has many norms. So has almost any act; jumps can deserve praise as long or brave, criticism as short or cowardly. But it (...) is natural to suppose that some norms are more intimately connected to the nature of asserting than any norm is to the nature of jumping. One might suppose, for example, that someone who knowingly asserts a falsehood has thereby broken a rule of assertion, much as if he had broken a rule of a game; he has cheated. On this view, the speech act, like a game and unlike the act of jumping, is constituted by rules. Thus, not all norms for assertion are on a par. Norms such as relevance, good phrasing, and politeness are just applications of more general cognitive or social norms to the specific act of assertion. Perhaps the norm of informativeness results from a more complex interaction between a general norm of cooperativeness and the nature of assertion as a source of information. But on this view, not all norms for assertion derive from more general norms; otherwise nothing would differentiate it from other speech acts. (shrink)

Abstract: Some recent arguments against the classical invariantist account of knowledge exploit the idea that there is a ‘knowledge norm’ for assertion. It is claimed that, given the existence of this norm, certain intuitions about assertability support contextualism, or contrastivism, over classical invariantism. In this paper I show that, even if we accept the existence of a knowledge norm, these assertability-based arguments fail. The classical invariantist can accommodate and explain the relevant intuitions about assertability, in a way (...) that retains the idea that knowledge is the epistemic norm for assertion. When we consider the role of assertion as a conversational act, it becomes plausible that a subject's epistemic warrant to assert can be defeated even though she has knowledge. This defeasibility thesis is what allows the classical invariantist to accommodate and explain the kinds of intuitions on which assertability-based arguments depend. (shrink)

Keith DeRose has recently argued that the contextual variability of appropriate assertion, together with the knowledge account of assertion, yields a direct argument that 'knows' is semantically context-sensitive. The argument fails because of an equivocation on the notion of warranted assertability. Once the equivocation is removed, it can be seen that the invariantist can retain the knowledge account of assertion and explain the contextual variability of appropriate assertion by appealing to Williamson's suggestion that practical and conversational considerations can (...) influence the extent to which adherence to the constitutive norm of assertion matters. (shrink)

Keith DeRose has argued that ‘the knowledge account of assertion – according to which what one is in a position to assert is what one knows – ... provides a ... powerful positive argument in favor of contextualism’ (2009: 80). The truth is that it yields a powerful argument against contextualism, at least against its most popular, anti-sceptical versions. The following argument shows that, if we conjoin (such versions of) epistemic contextualism with an appropriate meta-linguistic formulation of the knowledge account (...) of assertion, contextualism cannot coherently be stated. (shrink)

Many contemporary philosophers argue that assertion is governed by an epistemic norm. In particular, many defend the knowledge account of assertion, which says that one should assert only what one knows. Here, I defend a non‐normative alternative to the knowledge account that I call the repK account of assertion. According to the repK account, assertion represents knowledge, but it is not governed by a constitutive epistemic rule. I show that the repK account offers a more straightforward interpretation of the conversational (...) patterns and intuitions that motivate the knowledge account. It does so in terms of ordinary normative principles that philosophers already accept, none of which are constitutive to assertion. I then contend that the repK account is preferable to the knowledge account because it is simpler, its implications are less contentious, and it avoids a problem for normative accounts of assertion recently raised by Peter Pagin. I also argue that the repK account offers a satisfying explanation of selfless assertion, a counterexample to the knowledge account posed by Jennifer Lackey. (shrink)

Several prominent philosophers assume that the so-called ‘Belief–Assertion Parallel’ warrants epistemic norm correspondence; as such, they argue from the epistemic norm governing one to the epistemic norm governing the other. This paper argues that, in all its readings, the belief–assertion parallel lacks the desired normative import.

Under the influence of Hilary Putnam’s collapse of the fact/value dichotomy, a resurging approach that challenges the movements of American pragmatism and discourse ethics, I tease out in the first section of my paper the demand for the warranted assertibility hypothesis in Putnam’s sense that may be possible, relying on moral realism to get rid of ‘rampant Platonism’. Tracing back to ‘communicative action’ or the Habermasian way that puts forward the reciprocal understanding of discourse instigates the idea of life-world (...) as composed of ‘culturally transmitted and linguistically organized stock of interpretative patterns’, this section looks for whether Habermas’ psychoanalysis of prolonged discussion can accord with Putnam’s thick ethical terms or not. The last section of the paper pitfalls Putnam’s stance to accepting Habermas’ ‘discourse ethics’ that centers around the context of entangling ‘rational thoughts’ to ‘communication’, but he introduces the idea of fallibilism in a rational query that also attacks the Habermasian metaphysical idea of the validity of ethical statements that goes towards the truth. My next attempt is to see whether Putnam’s objective dictum towards morality that resonates the collapse of fact/value dichotomy from a universalistic stand can successfully evade Rorty’s naive realism and Habermas’ ‘sociologism about values’ respectively. This sort of claim insists on a universalizable pattern of culture-relative value. I consider that the idea of a fact/value dichotomy engages with the inextricable entanglement between the normative and descriptive content, besides the epistemic values having exclusively intertwined with the structure of factual discourse that intends towards collapsing the fact/value dichotomy, a subjective universalizability predilection. (shrink)

Abstract Under the influence of Hilary Putnam’s collapse of the fact/value dichotomy, a resurging approach that challenges the movements of American pragmatism and discourse ethics, I tease out in the first section of my paper the demand for the warranted assertibility hypothesis in Putnam’s sense that may be possible, relying on moral realism to get rid of ‘rampant Platonism’. Tracing back to ‘communicative action’ or the Habermasian way that puts forward the reciprocal understanding of discourse instigates the idea of (...) life-world as composed of ‘culturally transmitted and linguistically organized stock of interpretative patterns’, this section looks for whether Habermas’ psychoanalysis of prolonged discussion can accord with Putnam’s thick ethical terms or not. The last section of the paper pitfalls Putnam’s stance to accepting Habermas’ ‘discourse ethics’ that centers around the context of entangling ‘rational thoughts’ to ‘communication’, but he introduces the idea of fallibilism in a rational query that also attacks the Habermasian metaphysical idea of the validity of ethical statements that goes towards the truth. My next attempt is to see whether Putnam’s objective dictum towards morality that resonates the collapse of fact/value dichotomy from a universalistic stand can successfully evade Rorty’s naive realism (structured by linguistic representation) and Habermas’ ‘sociologism about values’ (a kind of minimalist ethics depending on solidarity) respectively. This sort of claim insists on a universalizable pattern of culture-relative value. I consider that the idea of a fact/value dichotomy engages with the inextricable entanglement between the normative and descriptive content, besides the epistemic values having exclusively intertwined with the structure of factual discourse that intends towards collapsing the fact/value dichotomy, a subjective universalizability predilection. (shrink)

In Knowledge and its Limits (KAIL), Timothy Williamson argues for the view that “only knowledge warrants assertion” (2000, 243). Call this the knowledge norm of assertion. Several philosophers including DeRose, Hawthorne, and Stanley, agree that if the knowledge norm is true, then knowledge itself depends on stakes, since warranted assertability seems to change with what is at stake if the proposition in question is true (1992; 2003; 2005). This brings us to the question: stakes for whom? DeRose maintains (...) that knowledge depends on the stakes for the speaker of the knowledge attribution, arguing for Epistemic Contextualism (2002, 187). However, Hawthorne and Stanley disagree, contending that it is the stakes for the subject of the knowledge attribution which is relevant, arguing for Subject Sensitive Invariantism (2003, 157; 2005, 85). While the Contextualist and the Invariantist are armed with responses against each other’s view, I suspect that Russell’s and Doris’ indifference cases might break the impasse in favor of the Contextualist (2008, 432). This paper will thus attempt to show that the knowledge norm of assertion leads us to Contextualism rather than Subject Sensitive Invariantism, by comparing how Contextualism and Subject Sensitive Invariantism fare against Russell’s and Doris’ Indifference Cases. (shrink)

The following article is only in part a review of Rorty’s “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”. First I sketch the development of the two leading metaphors, which Rorty considers as being central for epistemology, namely the mirror of nature and the eye of the mind. Then I try to bring out the antirealist implications of Rorty’s socalled “epistemological behaviorism” and to make sense of his slogan that truth is merely warranted assertability which in my view seems not (...) to be in line with his favouring truth-conditional semantics. Thirdly I point to some possible consequences for the social sciences of using the antirealist “criteria!” semantics of the later Wittgen stein, one of Rorty’s heroes. (shrink)

Scott Aiken and Thomas Dabay contend that a satisfactory account of truth is both infallibilist and antiskeptical. Externalist correspondence theories, they say, preserve the infallibility of the truth-relation yet invite skeptical qualms. In tying truth to experience, pragmatist theories resist skeptical challenges, but embrace a fallibilism that renders their account of truth inconsistent and even incoherent. While agreeing with Aiken and Dabay that externalist accounts are vulnerable to skepticism, I dispute each of the four arguments they offer against pragmatist fallibilism. (...) Though partially successful against Peirce’s more popular view that truth is the final belief of a community of inquirers, their arguments are wholly ineffective against Dewey’s account of truth as warranted assertability. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider how a general epistemic norm of action that I have proposed in earlier work should be specified in order to govern certain types of acts: assertive speech acts. More specifically, I argue that the epistemic norm of assertion is structurally similar to the epistemic norm of action. First, I argue that the notion of warrant operative in the epistemic norm of a central type of assertion is an internalist one that I call ‘discursive justification.’ This (...) type of warrant is internalist insofar as it requires that the agent is capable of articulating reasons for her belief. The idea, roughly, is that when one asserts that p, one is supposed to be in a position to give reasons for believing that p. Bonjour’s reliable clairvoyant Norman, for example, is not in an epistemic position to make assertions regarding the president’s whereabouts—even if Norman knows the president’s whereabouts. In conclusion, I briefly consider whether a type of skeptical argument—often labeled Agrippa’s Trilemma—is motivated, at least in part, by the fact that responses to it violate the relevant epistemic norm of assertion. (shrink)

Contextualists support their view by appeal to cases which show that whether an attribution of knowledge seems correct depends on attributor factors. Contextualists conclude that the truth-conditions of knowledge attributions depend on the attributor's context. Invariantists respond that these cases show only that the warranted assertability-conditions of knowledge attributions depend on the attributor's context. I examine DeRose's recent argument against the possibility of such an invariantist response, an argument which appeals to the knowledge account of assertion and the (...) context-sensitivity of assertion. I argue that DeRose's new argument does not rule out either of the two forms of invariantism, classic and subject-sensitive invariantism. Further, I argue against DeRose that an invariantist can explain the context-sensitivity of assertion. (shrink)