Abstract
Herman Cappelen has recently argued in favor of what he calls “the no assertion view”, where the putative speech act is replaced with Paul Grice’s category of ‘sayings’. To make his case, Cappelen produces four arguments against Timothy Williamson’s normative view of assertion, holding that the same arguments can be used mutatis mutandis against other non-normative views of assertion. In this paper I examine all four of Cappelen’s arguments against normative theories of assertion, and conclude that they fail.
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Notes
As he tells us, “…if it is a constitutive rule that one must ϕ, then it is necessary that one must ϕ” (Williamson 2000, p. 239).
Of course most of us take Saul Kripke to have shown the move from (1) to (2) to be fallacious. However, it does seem to be the one that Cappelen employs when he says, “If conceivability is a guide to possibility and we can conceive of paradigmatic assertions as governed by norms other than [the knowledge norm], we have evidence against N-theories.” (Cappelen 2011, p. 30. Italics removed from original).
Cappelen’s final point in the above quotation, the one that he tells us is “the key point” of his argument seems to be a bit of a red herring. Yes, he is correct in saying that any maxim could give rise to a bad conjunction. I could make a bad conjunction by saying, “p, but perhaps that’s too much information” and thereby violate the maxim of quantity or say “p, but perhaps that is a bit too obscure” and violate the maxim of manner, or “p, but I suppose that that’s not relevant” and hence have violated the maxim of relation. Yet, these statements strike me at least as being somewhat awkward rather than infelicitous. Indeed, they seem to be easily inserted into dialogues. Moorean violations of quality, however, do not. They alone are infelicitous violations of conversational maxims. This by itself should cast doubt on Cappelen’s argument.
Also:
The maxims do not seem to be coordinate. The maxim of Quality, enjoining the provision of contributions which are genuine rather than spurious (truthful rather than mendacious), does not seem to be just one among a number of recipes for producing contributions; it seems rather to spell out the difference between something’s being, and (strictly speaking) failing to be, any kind of contribution at all. False information is not an inferior kind of information; it just is not information. (Grice 1989, p. 371, Emphasis added).
Sports seem to be for more likely to contain both kinds of constitutive rules. Other games, like chess for instance, can plausibly be understood as containing only brute constitutive rules.
Hintikka (1962, p. 67). Now, in claiming that belief in the truth of p is presupposed by a normal conversational use of p, we run into an immediate problem. As Stalnaker notes, pragmatic presuppositions typically come about by way of a presupposition trigger, words like, “few, even, only, stop, accuse, refuse, admit, confess, pretend, continue, resume, before, and after” (Stalnaker 1973, p. 448. See Levin 1983, pp. 181–185 for a much more thorough list). However, we have nothing like that in this case. Instead, we seem to have a presupposition that is not triggered by a single word or clause in the sentence, but rather by the sentence itself. How plausible is this? As it turns out this is possible under at least some understandings of presuppositions. Consider the following definitions of presupposition:
A speaker presupposes that P at a given moment in a conversation just in case he is he is disposed to act, in his linguistic behavior, as if he takes the truth of P for granted, and as if he assumes that his audience recognizes that he is doing so (Ibid., Italics removed from original).
If at time t something is said that requires presupposition P to be acceptable, and if P is not presupposed just before t, then—ceteris paribus and within certain limits—presupposition P comes into existence at t (Lewis 1979, p. 340).
A member S of a conversation presupposes a proposition P at time t iff at t S believes or assumes:
-
a.
P;
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b.
that the other members of the conversation also believe or assume P; and
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c.
that the other members of the conversation recognize that S believes or assumes (a) and (b) (Soames 1982, p. 485).
The point here is not that one of these definitions is the correct account of presupposition, but rather that regardless of which theory we choose, it seems that the global presupposition of belief in p is compatible with the account given regardless of the missing trigger. The existence of this presupposition can further be inferred by the fact, that as Peter Unger and Timothy Williamson have both noted, when we challenge an assertion of p we often do so by questioning the quality of the asserter’s epistemic standing in relation to p. Hence, “Do you really believe that?” or perhaps the stronger “How do you know that?” can be appropriate replies to a rather shocking or apparently incorrect declaration of p. These responses simply would not make any sense if S’s belief that p was not presupposed by her assertion of p. Therefore, if Stalnaker’s analysis of the phenomena is correct, then this particular presupposition is a propositional attitude about a propositional attitude.
-
a.
I can arguably frustrate the goals of a conversation by also refusing to stay on topic, that is by flaunting the only submaxim of relation. However, there is still the undeniably intuitive result that we can still be following a norm-governed rule of assertion if we fly off topic, but that we cannot do so if we assert falsely.
References
Cappelen, H. (2011). Against Assertion. In J. Brown & H. Cappelen (Eds.), Assertion: New philosophical essays (pp. 21–48). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Engel, P. (2008). In what sense is knowledge the norm of assertion? In F. Lihoreau (Ed.), Knowledge and questions. New York: Rodopi.
Grice, P. (1989). Studies in the ways of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hindriks, F. (2007). The status of the knowledge account of assertion. Linguistics and Philosophy, 30, 393–406.
Hintikka, J. (1962). Knowledge and belief: An introduction to the logic of the two notions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Lackey, J. (2007). Norms of assertion. Noûs, 41, 594–626.
Levin, S. C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lewis, D. (1979). Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8, 339–359.
Soames, S. (1982). How presuppositions are inherited: A solution to the projection problem. Linguistic Inquiry, 13, 483–545.
Stalnaker, R. (1973). Presuppositions. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 2, 447–457.
Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and its limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Matthew McGrath, Claire Horisk, and an anonymous referee to this journal for helpful comments.
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Montgomery, B. In defense of assertion. Philos Stud 171, 313–326 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0273-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0273-9