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Assertion: On the Philosophical Significance of Assertoric Speech

Online ISBN:
9780191796708
Print ISBN:
9780198732488
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Assertion: On the Philosophical Significance of Assertoric Speech

Sanford C. Goldberg
Sanford C. Goldberg
Northwestern University
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Published online:
23 April 2015
Published in print:
1 February 2015
Online ISBN:
9780191796708
Print ISBN:
9780198732488
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book concerns the speech act of assertion. It defends the view that this type of speech act is answerable to a constitutive norm—the norm of assertion. Its core contention is this: the hypothesis that assertion is answerable to a robustly epistemic norm is uniquely suited to explain assertion’s philosophical significance—its connections to other philosophically interesting topics. These include topics in epistemology (testimony and testimonial knowledge, epistemic authority, disagreement), the philosophy of mind (belief, the theory of mental content), the philosophy of language (norms of language, the method of interpretation, the theory of linguistic content), ethics (the ethics of belief, what we owe to each other as information-seeking creatures), and other matters which transcend any subcategory (anonymity, trust, the division of epistemic labor, Moorean paradoxicality). The book aims to bring out these connections without assuming anything about the precise content of assertion’s norm, beyond regarding it as robustly epistemic. In the last section of the book, however, it is proposed that the best is done to see the norm’s epistemic standard as set in a context-sensitive fashion. After motivating this proposal by appeal to Grice’s Cooperative Principle and spelling it out in terms of what is mutually believed in the speech context, it concludes by noting how this sort of context-sensitivity can be made to square with assertion’s philosophical significance.

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