Theres a widespread conviction in the norms of assertion literature that an agents asserting something false merits criticism. As Williamson puts it, asserting something false is likened to cheating at the game of assertion. Most writers on the topic have consequently proposed factive norms of assertion ones on which truth is a necessary condition for the proper performance of an assertion. However, I argue that this view is mistaken. I suggest that we can illuminate the error by introducing a theoretical distinction between the norm of a practice and its goal. In light of this distinction, we can see that proponents of factive norms tend to mistake the goal of a practice for the norm. In making my case, I present an analogy between the norms and goals of placing wagers and the norms and goals of assertion. One may place a bet and lose without being subject to criticism, while one may win and be worthy of criticism. Whether one wins or loses is irrelevant to the normative evaluation of a bet. What is relevant is whether the bet maximizes the bettor’s expected value, which is a function of what might be lost, what might be gained, and how likely those prospects are, given the bettor’s evidence. Similarly, I argue, whether one’s assertion is true or false is not strictly relevant to the normative evaluation of an assertion. What is relevant is whether the speaker has adequate supporting reasons for the assertion, and that the necessary conventional and pragmatic features are present. However, context will determine what count as supportive reasons for a given proposition, what counts as relevant, and what count as conventional and pragmatic elements possessing that relevance. My proposed norm, the Supportive Reasons Norm, is thus sensitive to the context of assertion and shifts from context to context.

Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions

Reasonable Assertions: On Norms of Assertion and Why You Don't Need to Know What You're Talking About

An account of meta-epistemic defeaters—distinct from traditional (first-order) epistemic defeaters—is motivated and defended, drawing from case studies involving epistemic error-theory (e.g., Olson 2011, Reasons for belief; cf., Streumer 2012, J Philos 110:1–25) and epistemic relativism (e.g., MacFarlane 2005, Oxford Stud Epistemol 1:197–233; 2011; 2014, Assessment sensitivity: Relative truth and its applications). Mechanisms of traditional epistemic defeat and meta-epistemic defeat are compared and contrasted, and some new puzzles are introduced.

background

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Meta-Epistemic Defeat

I begin by describing the solution to the problem of skepticism propounded by contextualists, which constitutes the background of the rest of the paper. I then address the question of what happens when a skeptic and a non-skeptic are confronted in dialogue to the standards in play for correct knowledge ascription, on the assumption that contextualism about knowledge is right. I argue against Keith DeRose that there are reasons, both intuitive and theoretical, to conclude that the standards will be raised in such a way as to make the skeptic’s denials of knowledge true. Next, I argue, again against DeRose, for the claim that that conclusion has significant theoretical consequences. In particular, I argue that, if the standards do tend to rise, then there is a serious problem for contextualist answers to skepticism. The problem, which is sometimes called the factivity problem, is that the contextualist position is not possible to state properly unless we know in the theoretical context that skeptical hypotheses do not hold.

In Conversation with the Skeptic: Contextualism and the Raising of Standards

Deductive Cogency holds that the set of propositions towards which one has, or is prepared to have, a given type of propositional attitude should be consistent and closed under logical consequence. While there are many propositional attitudes that are not subject to this requirement, e.g. hoping and imagining, it is at least prima facie plausible that Deductive Cogency applies to the doxastic attitude involved in propositional knowledge, viz. (outright) belief. However, this thought is undermined by the well-known preface paradox, leading a number of philosophers to conclude that Deductive Cogency has at best a very limited role to play in our epistemic lives. I argue here that Deductive Cogency is still an important epistemic requirement, albeit not as a requirement on belief. Instead, building on a distinction between belief and acceptance introduced by Jonathan Cohen and recent developments in the epistemology of understanding, I propose that Deductive Cogency applies to the attitude of treating propositions as given in the context of attempting to understand a given phenomenon. I then argue that this simultaneously accounts for the plausibility of the considerations in favor of Deductive Cogency and avoids the problematic consequences of the preface paradox.

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Deductive Cogency, Understanding, and Acceptance

ion and reduction) gives us a formal analog of (un)saturation, that permits a compositional semantics for OL. Recall that Frege’s notion of (un)saturation is analogous to the notion of a mathematical function. A saturated Thought that denotes a truth-value is the result of taking an unsaturated sense, and saturating it with a saturated sense that denotes an object. Put crudely, if you give an unsaturated sense a saturater of the right kind it gives you a saturated sense. This unsaturated sense is like a function that takes saturated senses of one kind and maps them to saturated senses of another kind. We introduced a distinction in the domain to approximate the Fregean idea that there are two kinds of saturated senses, drawing a distinction in the domain between objects of type and objects of type . We also gave definitions for the kinds of expressions that denote these domain objects. The idea then is to treat unsaturated denotations as functions that maps domain objects of type to domain objects of type : functions of type . The process of λ-abstraction (just described) makes this possible. But now we need to articulate the notion of denotation for such a λ-expressions(abstractions): Det D(λxn.φ (xn), σ) = the smallest function F of type such that for each σ′ such that σ′ is a variant of σ, F maps D(xn, σ′) to D(φ (xn), σ′) The idea here is that the λ-operator serves as a kind of prefix that changes an expression of type that lacks a constant denotation, into a denoting expression that has a constant denotation—a function. An example using OL will be illustrative here. Consider the OL expression:

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Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions

Citations

Reasonable Assertions: On Norms of Assertion and Why You Don't Need to Know What You're Talking About

Meta-Epistemic Defeat

In Conversation with the Skeptic: Contextualism and the Raising of Standards

Deductive Cogency, Understanding, and Acceptance

Internalist Deflationism: On the Limits of Ontological Investigation

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