Abstract
The Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA) says that knowledge is the norm of assertion: you may assert a proposition only if you know that it’s true. The primary support for KAA is an explanatory inference from a broad range of linguistic data. The more data that KAA well explains, the stronger the case for it, and the more difficult it is for the competition to keep pace. In this paper we critically assess a purported new linguistic datum, which, it has been argued, KAA well explains. We argue that KAA does not well explain it.
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Notes
Competing accounts of assertion include the Truth Account, which says truth is the norm of assertion (Weiner 2005), the Belief Account, which says belief is the norm of assertion (Bach 2008), and the Reasonable Belief Account, which says that reasonable belief is the norm of assertion (Kvanvig 2009; relatedly, Douven 2006; Lackey 2007; McKinnon 2012), and the Certainty Account, which says that certainty is the norm of assertion (Stanley 2008).
At least, it does not do so as easily as ‘I believe’ does. More on this below.
We are ambivalent about whether this sentence should end with a question mark or a period.
An anonymous referee asks whether Benton might take a cue from Blaauw (2012), who points out that the parenthetical ‘I know’ can be used to ‘reinforce’ an unadorned assertion that P by upgrading it to a claim to know that P. Perhaps, the referee suggests, the parenthetical ‘I ask’ or ‘I’m curious’ or ‘I say’ can also ‘serve to reinforce the main claim of the sentence in question.’ We tend to doubt that this suggestion will work, for two reasons. First, interrogatives don’t make claims, so there is no claim for ‘I ask’ or ‘I’m curious’ to reinforce. Second, ‘I say’ typically functions as a hedge, not as a reinforcement in Blaauw’s sense. (Blaauw 2012: 107 makes essentially the same point about ‘I believe’.) We do agree that ‘I say’ or ‘I claim’, ‘I ask’, etc., can add rhetorical emphasis, but this is not the same as reinforcement in Blaauw’s sense. And as we explain in the main text below, there will always be ways to modify the context so that adding a parenthetical is non-redundant, but this isn’t enough for Benton’s purposes.
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Acknowledgments
For helpful feedback and conversation, we thank Matt Benton, Tim Kenyon and Angelo Turri. This research was kindly supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Academy/Association of Commonwealth Universities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and an Ontario Early Researcher Award.
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McKinnon, R., Turri, J. Irksome assertions. Philos Stud 166, 123–128 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0028-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0028-z