Abstract
I argue that the debates over which norm constitutes assertion can be abandoned by challenging the three main motivations for a constitutive norm. The first motivation is the alleged analogy between language and games. The second motivation is the intuition that some assertions are worthy of criticism. The third is the discursive responsibilities incurred by asserting. I demonstrate that none of these offer good reasons to believe in a constitutive norm of assertion, as such a norm is understood in the literature. Others who have made similar arguments conclude that assertion does not exist at all—that there is no such thing as assertion. I disagree: we do not have to relinquish the category of assertion just because it is not normatively constituted. There are alternative ways to understand and individuate assertion that do not rely on a constitutive norm.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Assuming that the constitutive norm of assertion does not fall into one of these categories.
We might also want to call this constitutive propriety; however, any normatively constituted behavior would have a kind of propriety that picked out actions of that kind, so the idea of calling it “assertoric” is to draw attention to the fact that having this propriety condition is what picks an action out as an assertion.
Similar observations and arguments can be found in Cappelen (2011).
I say “more or less”, because there are instances in which some rules—even rules that seem central to the game—are ignored, and soccer is still being played. Take, for example, the rule that game play ceases momentarily when the ball goes out of bounds. In many casual contexts, that rule is suspended. Players can play soccer even without observing strict sidelines. In fact, too strict adherence to some rules in casual contexts is frowned upon. In other contexts, though, no such suspension is acceptable. In professional play, all of the rules apply.
I take myself to be in good company here. Ishani Maitra argues against the games/language analogy for similar reasons in her (Maitra 2011).
Sellars, who employed the idea of a language game, did not even take assertion to be the appropriate analog for moves in a game (Sellars 1954). Instead, Sellars takes the analog to be something like meaning or content, rather than speech acts. Brandom’s use of the game analogy is relevantly similar (Brandom 1994).
Lackey (2007) has a nice discussion of this.
Perhaps with a large enough lottery, I can be certain that you did not win—perhaps with sufficiently small probability my belief that your ticket did not win counts as knowledge. I want to leave these admittedly interesting complications aside here.
As per Grice (1957)
Hill and Schechter (2007) have a nice discussion of a similar point.
The same lack of intuition arises if I say “This is a loosing ticket” about a ticket I have purchased for myself. I might be subject to criticism because I have purchased a ticket I believed to be a losing one, but it is not clear that there is anything wrong with my subsequently talking about it.
Lackey makes a similar point about Moorean and Lottery sentences (Lackey 2008).
Lackey’s cases are paradigmatic. Many philosophers have followed her in constructing their cases. Thus, the literature on assertion is peppered with examples with similarly weighty stakes. Other cases involve presidential decisions, exam results, or oncologist reports (Maitra and Weatherson 2010; Brown 2008; Lackey 2011). My arguments below will extend to these cases as well.
Admittedly, challenging that an asserter believes or has reason to believe the content she expresses in her assertion could be a way of challenging whether or not she knows. So, if these were the only legitimate challenges to assertion other than “how do you know?”, they would not undermine that knowledge is the constitutive norm. However, the next two challenges suggest that we are not just challenging the asserter’s knowledge. Indeed, the asserter can legitimately be challenged on many fronts. That is Kvanvig’s point, here, and mine.
This kind of theory did not start with Rescorla, though his clear account of it makes a good target. We can trace similar ideas to MacFarlane (2011), Peirce et al. (1994), and to Peirce as explained by Boyd (Forthcoming).
And, if enacted privately, it could be challenged if the circumstances were different.
I suppose someone might bite this bullet and claim that, because all of these speech acts can be challenged in this way, all of these speech acts are assertion. This move, however, would just mean giving up the game of individuating assertion from other speech acts.
This is a gloss. Searle’s actual constitutive rule is that the utterance that p “counts as an undertaking to the effect that p represents an actual state of affairs”. If there are differences between that and the gloss I have suggested above, the reader’s preferred constitutive rule can be read in to the remaining of the paper.
References
Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do things with words. Clarendon Press.
Bach, K. (2010). Knowledge in and out of context. In M. O’Rourke, J. Campbell, & H. Silverstein (Eds.), Knowledge and skepticism. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Boyd, K. (2016). Peirce on assertion, speech acts, and taking responsibility. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society.
Brandom, R. (1994). Making it explicit: reasoning, representing, and discursive commitment: Harvard University Press.
Brandom, R. (1998). Making it explicit: reasoning, representing, and discursive commitment. Harvard University Press.
Brown, J. (2008). The knowledge norm for assertion. Philosophical Issues, 18(1), 89–103.
Brown, J. (2010). Knowledge and assertion. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81(3), 549–566.
Cappelen, H. (2011). Against assertion. In J. Brown & H. Cappelen (Eds.), Assertion: new philosophical essays. Oxford University Press.
DeRose, K. (2002). Assertion, knowledge, and context. Philosophical Review, 111(2), 167–203.
Goldberg, S. (2011. Putting the norm of assertion to work: the case of testimony*. In Assertion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grice, H. P. (1957). Meaning. Philosophical Review, 66(3), 377–388.
Hawthorne, J., & Stanley, J. (2008). Knowledge and action. The Journal of Philosophy, 105(10), 571–590.
Hill, C. S., & Schechter, J. (2007). Hawthorne's lottery puzzle and the nature of belief. Philosophical Issues, 17(1), 102–122.
Johnson, C. R. (2015). Testimony and the constitutive norm of assertion. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 23(3), 356–375.
Kukla, R., & Lance, M. N. (2009). ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’: the pragmatic topography of the space of reasons: Harvard University Press.
Kvanvig, J. (2009). Assertion, knowledge, and lotteries. Williamson on Knowledge:140–160.
Kvanvig, J. (2011). Norms of assertion. Assertion: New philosophical Essays: 233–250.
Lackey, J. (2007). Norms of assertion. Noûs, 41(4), 594–626.
Lackey, Jennifer. (2008). Learning from words: testimony as a source of knowledge: Oxford University Press.
Lackey, J. (2011). Assertion and isolated second-hand knowledge. In J. Brown & H. Cappelen (Eds.), Assertion: new philosophical essays. 251–276. Oxford University Press.
Lewis, D. (1979). Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8(1), 339–359.
MacFarlane, J. (2011). What is assertion? In J. Brown & H. Cappelen (Eds.), Assertion.
Maitra, I. (2011). Assertion, norms, and games. In J. Brown & H. Cappelen (Eds.), Assertion: new philosophical essays (pp. 277–296). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Maitra, I., & Weatherson, B. (2010). Assertion, knowledge, and action. Philosophical Studies, 149(1), 99–118.
Mcgowan, M. (2003). Conversational exercitives and the force of pornography. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 31(2), 155–189.
McKinnon, R. (2012). What I learned in the lunch room about assertion and practical reasoning. Logos and Episteme, 3(4), 565–569.
Pagin, P. (2015). Problems with norms of assertion. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
Peirce, C. S., Hartshorne C., Weiss P., & Burks A. W. (1994). The collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Electronic Edition. Volume 8: Reviews, Correspondence, and Bibliography: InteLex Corporation.
Price, H. (2010). Truth as convenient friction. In M. de Caro & D. Macarthur (Eds.), Naturalism and normativity, 167–190. Columbia University Press.
Rescorla, M. (2009a). Assertion and its constitutive norms. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 79(1), 98–130.
Rescorla, M. (2009b). Shifting the burden of proof? The Philosophical Quarterly, 59(234), 86–109.
Sbisà, M. (2002). Speech acts in context. Language & Communication, 22(4), 421–436.
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. Vol. 20: Cambridge University Press.
Sellars, W. (1954). Some reflections on language games. Philosophy of Science:204–228.
Stanley, J. (2008). Knowledge and certainty. Philosophical Issues, 18(1), 35–57.
Turri, J. (2013). Knowledge and suberogatory assertion. Philosophical Studies (3):1–11.
Whiting, D. (2015). Truth is (Still) the norm for assertion: a reply to Littlejohn. Erkenntnis:1–9.
Williamson, T. (1996a). Knowing and asserting. Philosophical Review, 105(4), 489–523.
Williamson, T. (1996b). Knowledge and its limits. Oxford University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (2010). Philosophical investigations. John Wiley & Sons.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Johnson, C.R. What Norm of Assertion?. Acta Anal 33, 51–67 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-017-0326-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-017-0326-3