Abstract
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.
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Notes
In all of our formulations of the proposed norms of assertion, the inclusion of “epistemically positioned” (as opposed to simply “positioned”) accounts for the fact that the epistemic state to which the norm refers might be insufficient for various kinds of non-epistemic propriety. Formulations of the norms that lack such a qualification would be open to obvious and philosophically uninteresting counterexamples.
After all, it would seem that an asserter who asserts a proposition on scant evidence, or as the result of prejudice or superstition, is epistemically criticisable even if the assertion turns out to be true. This counts in favour of the idea that whatever norm governs assertion epistemically will be sensitive not only to the truth value of the assertion but also to the epistemic grounds possessed by the asserter.
Douven (2008) defends what he calls the Rationally Credible Norm of Assertion. According to this norm: One is properly epistemically positioned to assert only what is rationally credible to one.
Lackey (2007) defends what she calls the Reasonable to Believe Norm of Assertion according to which one is properly epistemically positioned to assert that p only if (i) it is reasonable to one to believe that p, and (ii) if one asserted that p, one would assert that p at least in part because it is reasonable for one to believe that p. One supporting case that Lackey uses to show how her norm works involves a woman asserting that a co-worker forget to turn the alarm on before leaving work because she does not want to be suspected for this error herself, even though she loves that co-worker in a way that actually prevents her from rationally suspecting him. Here, this woman’s assertion is obviously improper, and the reasonable to believe norm gives just this result—even though the asserted proposition is reasonable, it is not asserted because it is reasonable.
We do not mean to imply here that the property of a belief constituted in it’s ‘being true’ constitutes epistemic support for the belief. Though the truth and knowledge accounts of assertion differ from justification accounts on the point of whether asserted beliefs must have the property of being true to be warranted, the relevant point we make is that what distinguishes each view uniquely from the others is the matter of how much epistemic support is warranted for assertion.
That we have excellent reason not to deny this uncontroversial assumption is not solely due to the fact that it is considered uncontroversial across the reductionist/non-reductionist debate, but also because of considerations related to skepticism—ones that should be held in mind regardless of what one’s commitments are in the epistemology of testimony. After all, testimony is ubiquitous as a source of human knowledge, and expert testimony (in the absence of defeaters) is testimony at its best. To question whether expert testimony (absent defeaters) is good enough for knowledge is to offer up to the sceptic testimonial knowledge more generally—a considerable and unpalatable concession to the sceptic indeed.
Lackey adds some helpful detail here. She writes: ‘One reason for this is that Matilda is an expert—she is an oncologist and Derek’s physician, and such roles carry with them certain epistemic duties. In DOCTOR, these responsibilities may include having reviewed the test results firsthand, possessing reasons for choosing one condition over another, knowing details about the size and nature of the cancer, and so on. But the overarching epistemic duty here is that, qua oncologist, Matilda should be able to (at lest partially) explain or justify the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer that she is offering to her patient. Moreover, as her patient, Derek reasonably has the right to expect his doctor to fulfill such a duty.’ (2007: 6)
On this point, Lackey adds further that when ‘asserters are experts who are offering assertions in contexts that call for their expertise… they are expected to be able to defend or offer support for the assertions that they make when occupying such roles.’ (Lackey 2010: 7).
We are claiming here that satisfaction of C1–C3 would ensure that (i) and (ii) hold. We’re not claiming that satisfying C1–C3 are necessary for satisfying (i) and (ii) and thus generating a counterexample to SUFF. We leave open the possibility that other cases where one or more of C1–C3 are not satisfied and yet (i) and (ii) are satisfied. We maintain only that the satisfaction of C1–C3 is one ‘recipe’ for guaranteeing countercases to (i) and (ii)—and this is the recipe that is followed by Lackey’s examples.
We take this up in some detail in § 3.
At this point, we could point out that further weakening the sufficiency claim of the knowledge norm would make it immune to these sorts of counterexamples. We could amend the sufficiency claim to read only that one has the quantity of epistemic support required to properly assert that p if one knows that p—this is compatible with the claim that knowledge isn’t sufficient to have the quality of epistemic support demanded by proper assertion. However, (i) this represents an extreme weakening of the sufficiency claim of the knowledge norm (as it clearly concedes that knowledge is not qualitatively sufficient for epistemically proper assertion), and (ii) a high-stakes practical context case can be construed as a counterexample to this ultra-weak knowledge norm, i.e. as showing that knowledge isn’t even sufficient for possessing the quantity of epistemic support required for proper assertion. It seems as though proper assertion in high-stakes cases might require more than knowledge, so even the very weak version of SUFF is lacking in plausibility.
Milne writes: ‘…Lackey speaks of Derek feeling epistemically cheated if Matilda cannot back up her assertion in the way expected of an oncological expert (Lackey forthcoming, pp. 6–7) … Lackey does nothing to show that the defect, if such it is, is epistemic.’ (Milne 2010: pp. 15–16).
To see why this point is plausible, Lackey asks us to consider what would happen if the institutions changed such that it was no longer improper to offer assertions grounded purely in isolated secondhand knowledge. If, for instance, the medical profession changed so that diagnoses from specialists could be grounded entirely in a single instance of reliable testimony, this institution would no longer serve the epistemic purpose for which it was created. Patients would no longer regard the medical verdict of an expert as having a certain kind of epistemic authority, and thus they would cease to consult with specialists to obtain precisely the specialized information that the medical profession intended these doctors to provide. (Lackey 2010: 23)
We have not taken a stand at this point on whether all assertions would be answerable to the same epistemic norm governing their appropriateness or whether different epistemic norms might govern different classes of assertions. So, in asking this question, we do not intend to imply that some particular norm (of a particular quality) should govern all assertions uniformly. Whether one should is a point we will take up later in the paper.
It is worth noting here that some (e.g. Pritchard 2010) suppose that one type of understanding-wh, specifically understanding-why, is paradigmatic and also the most interesting breed of understanding.
An example of hedging of this sort might be ‘I understand that the train leaves at seven o’clock’, which means something closer to ‘I believe that the train leaves at seven o’clock, but I have at least some cause to doubt this’. Another example is ‘I understood that you would be home earlier’, which is intended to soften the potentially confrontational fact that the hearer’s behaviour did not meet the speakers expectations. We base these examples on similar cases from Kvanvig (2003), who uses them for a different purpose (i.e. to explain away apparently non-factive uses of understanding).
Fully defending this claim about propositional understanding is beyond the scope of this paper. However, if you are not convinced by our brief outline of the ‘misspeaking’ theory, you might see its plausibility if you notice that when one tries to spell out the difference between propositional understanding and knowledge, one immediately starts offering up features that are almost uncontroversially possessed of atomistic and/or objectual understanding—chiefly, a grasp of the relations that cohere separate (but related) true beliefs.
We think that cancer is the most plausible subject matter here because (i) it is uncontroversially considered a subject matter in itself (e.g. in medical school and textbooks), and (ii) other available options such as ‘medicine’ and ‘Derek’s cancer’ seem too large and too ad hoc respectively to be the subject matter required here. However, even if we are mistaken and one of these other options is actually the relevant subject matter, it is still the case that objectual understanding of either is neither necessary nor sufficient for permissible assertion of Derek’s diagnosis. In the former case, this is because (like ‘cancer’), the subject matter of ‘medicine’ is unwarrantedly large. In the latter case, it is because making the subject matter as small as ‘Derek’s cancer’ to avoid our claim about necessity and sufficiency means that the type of understanding in the relevant norm of assertion actually collapses into atomistic understanding—specifically, understanding why something is the case.
Note that the expected familiarity we have of the maths teacher (in virtue of her occupation of that role) is not that she explain why an answer is wrong by explaining both where mistakes are and why the axioms themselves are true (a deep philosophical problem). It is common sense that we don’t expect such a thing of maths teachers (particularly at that level), but rather merely expect that they know the relevant axioms and how to apply them (and expect that they be able to correct students on the basis of whether they applied these axioms correctly). We can therefore dispel the potential objection that, in virtue of being able to explain why some student gave the wrong answer, the maths teacher would also have to be able to explain why the fundamental truths of mathematics are what they are (or any of the sorts of questions that philosophers of maths might ask). The relevant familiarity apposite to her institutional role is not so demanding, but it is nonetheless demanding enough to make her assertion epistemically unwarranted when she could say nothing more to a student about why his answer is wrong than ‘the answer key says so.’
For a strong expert, the norm of assertion would be different because we hold strong experts epistemically accountable to a greater extent and in a different sort of way. For example, we expect that when Stephen Hawking says p that, because of his role as world-class leader in the field of quantum mechanics, he would be able (if challenged) to locate p within much broader and deeper contexts of explanation than, say, the recent PhD in our above example—contexts of the sort that would require, we think, objectual understanding of quantum mechanics (something that runs much deeper than what we expect someone to possess simply in virtue of occupying the position of university lecturer in physics).
Obviously, there are indeed many proper assertions for which any kind of understanding is not a necessary condition—for example, ‘the bird is yellow’ (an assertion of perceptual knowledge) does not require being able to fill out any further claim including the word ‘because’ before that particular assertion counts as permissible.
Notice that we are not trying to name or rigidly define the wider class governed by atomistic understanding as a norm of assertion—that is a further task that we clearly do not need to accomplish here. Here, our goal has simply been to show that there are cases where atomistic understanding is the norm of assertion.
A point of nuance is worth noting here: denying that some epistemic norm must constrain all assertions if constraining some assertions is compatible with an endorsement of some norm that governs all assertions. After all, one could endorse some epistemic norm N1 as one to which all assertions are answerable along side some other epistemic norm N2 to which only some assertions are criticisable. Were one to endorse such a position, she would be denying UAN even while maintaining N1 as an epistemic norm to which all assertions are answerable. This sort of position (which features a denial of UAN) is unavailable to the mainstream debate in virtue of its presupposing that there can not be ‘partial scope’ epistemic norms—such as the atomistic understanding norm we considered—which only constrain some restricted class of assertions.
Also, as a point to note, even if Williamson successfully defended the knowledge rule (which we’ve contended that he doesn’t), this would not in itself prove UAN because (as was suggested in fn. 24) the admission of one epistemic norm that governs all assertions is compatible with a further endorsement of some other epistemic norm that governs only some assertions.
Jessica Brown (2008: 98) considers the sort of argument Williamson would have had to provide, but doesn’t, to this end. She notes aptly that: “Williamson might offer a different defence of the uniqueness assumption. He might argue that if we can explain all the data concerning assertion by the assumption that it is governed by a unique constitutive rule, then it is gratuitous to assume that assertion is governed by more than one constitutive rule. He may say that the onus is on the proponent of a more complex account of assertion to point to data which cannot be explained on his simple account. Only if the proponent of the more complex account is able to do this is there any reason to suppose that assertion is governed by more than one constitutive rule.” 2008: 98)
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Carter, J.A., Gordon, E.C. Norms of Assertion: The Quantity and Quality of Epistemic Support. Philosophia 39, 615–635 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-011-9317-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-011-9317-6