Abstract
According to the widely endorsed Knowledge Account of Assertion, the epistemic requirements on assertion are captured by the Knowledge Norm of Assertion, which requires speakers only to assert what they know. This paper proposes that in addition to the Knowledge Norm there is also an Epistemic Propositional Certainty Norm of Assertion, which enjoins speakers only to assert p if they believe that p on the basis of evidence which makes p an epistemic propositional certainty. The paper explains how this propositional certainty norm accounts for a range of data related to the practice of assertion and defends the norm against general objections to certainty norms of assertion put forward by Duncan Pritchard, John Turri, and Timothy Williamson, by drawing on linguistic theories about epistemic modals and gradable predicate semantics. Together these considerations show that the prospects of a certainty account of assertion are much more promising than is usually assumed.
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Notes
KN also explains a range of conversational patterns (Williamson 2000, 2009; Turri 2011, 2013). Critics of KA typically respond that they can explain these data by different means and propose to replace KN with alternative less demanding norms, e.g., norms requiring truth (Weiner 2005), belief (Bach 2008), or sufficiently good reasons (Douven 2006; Kvanvig 2009; Lackey 2007; McKinnon 2013).
Note though that the distinction between metaphysical certainty and evidential certainty may not be a sharp one (DeRose 1998). For example, if we are sufficiently liberal about evidence, the trajectory of a flying baseball may serve as evidence that it will land in a particular place (DeRose 1998: pp. 74–79) but also settles where it will land.
For a possible exception, which can be disregarded here, see note 5 below.
Note that this norm is different from Stanley’s Certainty Norm of Assertion, CN, which says that appropriate assertion requires the speaker to be both subjectively and epistemically certain that p (Stanley 2008: p. 48). Most importantly, EPCN does not require speakers to be subjectively certain of the propositions they assert. In this context, however, I shall leave aside further discussion of Stanley’s proposal.
Possible exceptions involve contexts where evidential ‘certain’ gets an exocentric reading (Egan et al. 2005) where the speaker, S, asserting ‘It is not certain that p’ is not included in the contextually defined group of agents which has the evidence determining whether p is certain. Relative to such a context c, ‘It is not certain that p’ may be true even though S’s evidence would be sufficiently strong to make p an epistemic certainty by the standards of c, since S’s evidence is irrelevant to the certainty of p when ‘certain’ gets an exocentric reading. But presumably assertions of type (2) will be felicitous in such contexts. So for present purposes I will leave aside issues regarding exocentric readings.
In response, fallibilists have sought to defend their view by arguing either that concessive knowledge attributions may be true but are infelicitous for pragmatic reasons (Rysiew 2001; Dougherty and Rysiew 2009) or that they are false but that the fallibilist is not committed to their being true (Stanley 2005; Littlejohn 2011).
Of course, this is not to deny that other explanations may be available. But even so it is an advantage of EPCN that it removes the need for them.
See Lackey (2011) for further analogous examples.
Thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for comments which helped to get the account of Lackey’s diagnosis right.
Of course, whether Lackey would agree with this proposal is a different question. The important point here, however, is that a proponent of KN could rely on EPCN to account for the intuitions about DOCTOR, since nothing about the details of the case precludes this explanation. Thus, I do not pretend to show that EPCN provides the only possible explanation of the data, nor that Lackey’s diagnosis in terms of expert duties is wrong.
For references to contextualism as the standard, canonical or leading linguistic theory of modality, see von Fintel and Gillies (2008, 2011), Papafragou (2006), Portner (2009) and Yalcin (2011). A more thorough discussion of Kratzer’s approach cannot be undertaken here. But see Portner (2009) for a helpful overview.
For our purposes here we can do without a detailed account of how compatibility should be construed. Note though that the above presumes a notion of compatibility which is not simply a question of entailment. A proposition’s being epistemically necessary for a group requires that it is within their ‘epistemic reach’ (Egan 2007: p. 8) to realize the truth of the proposition based on their evidence. For further relevant discussion, see DeRose (1998), Hacking (1967: pp. 148–149), Littlejohn (2011) and MacFarlane (2011).
Thus, following a traditional evidentialist conception of evidence (Conee and Feldman 2004), a person’s evidence consists of her non-factive mental states, while others, notably Williamson (2000), equates evidence with factive mental states. Meanwhile, whether one favors one conception or the other is inessential to the argument here.
Gradable predicates like ‘certain’ have characteristic relations to scales measuring their degree, which are essential to their semantics (Kennedy 2007; Kennedy and McNally 2005). Epistemic ‘certain’ presumably has a similar semantic link to a scale which measures degree of certainty, or strength of epistemic position. Whether a proposition p is certain in the epistemic sense relative to a context c depends on whether the combined evidence of the contextually relevant group in c suffices to afford p with a degree of certainty above the threshold level fixed by the conversational background in c. How such a degree-semantics for gradable adjectives should be incorporated into a contextualist semantics for ‘certain’ is a further question. Fortunately, the case for EPCN does not depend on how this issue is resolved. For some discussion, see Portner (2009).
These considerations should be particularly persuasive to authors who have marshalled analogous arguments as support for KN (Williamson 2000; Turri 2011, 2013). On the other hand, critics of KN have questioned the extent to which the nature of challenges favors the view that KN is a norm of assertion, for instance, by arguing that other epistemic terms can play the same role as ‘know’ in challenges, or that the role of ‘know’ in challenges need not imply that there is (only) a knowledge norm, or that KN is constitutive of assertion (Gerken 2017; Johnson 2017; Kvanvig 2009; McKinnon 2012). As Sect. 6.4 will show, I am sympathetic to considerations along these lines. But while this puts considerable pressure on the view that there is a very direct and conclusive argument for KN from the nature of challenges, it does not suffice to show that KN cannot explain the data. Nor do such concerns show that EPCN cannot explain the analogous data concerning challenges involving epistemic certainty.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing up this issue.
The explanation for this correlation might be that the evidential conditions on satisfying the knowledge predicate and the certainty predicate are the same in typical circumstances, as proposed by Williamson (2000, 2009). Alternatively one might think that knowers typically have much stronger evidence for what they know than knowledge actually requires, and epistemic certainty typically only requires evidence a little stronger than knowledge level evidence. This would imply that in typical circumstances if something is known, then it is known on the basis of evidence sufficient for certainty.
The precise details of the proposal will depend on how we characterize ordinary, or typical, circumstances. But the present discussion does not depend on how this complicated question is answered. For this reason, I omit discussion of the issue.
Thus, as far as I am aware, those epistemologists who deny that knowledge entails certainty, e.g., typical fallibilists, do not rely on counter-examples with ordinary language expressions of epistemic certainty as support for their views. The kind of survey of the epistemological literature required to establish the absence of such cases, however, would be far too extensive an undertaking in the present context.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this variation of the case.
Thanks to another anonymous reviewer for suggesting this variation of the case.
But note that John’s behavior need not reflect that his understanding of the meaning of ‘true’ is atypical, odd, or false. The reason why he applies ‘true’ in an atypical way may be entirely epistemic. In this respect, the meaning and function of ‘By standards’-phrases resembles that of ‘According to’-constructions.
Of course, the case for EPCN is unlikely to impress opponents of KA who think that even knowledge is too strong an epistemic requirement on appropriate assertion. Ultimately the case for EPCN hence depends on how objections to KN may be handled. In this respect, the most significant issue relates to cases purported to show that unknown propositions may be fine to assert in situations where a subject has good reason to think that she asserts p knowingly, but is somehow the victim of misleading evidence or unrecognized gettierization. But while such cases may appear to pose a problem for KA, leading proponents of the account (DeRose 2002; Williamson 2000) argue that such assertions seem acceptable, because they are excusable although they violate KN. Those who want to argue that both KN and EPCN are norms of assertion also need a way to answer this concern since the same issue arises for their view. The proposal that KN and EPCN are both norms of assertion obviously confronts the same concern. But fortunately the kind of appeal to excusability suggested by DeRose and Williamson can be repeated to explain why violations of these conjoined norms may seem acceptable where a speaker has good but misleading reasons to think that she is asserting an epistemically certain proposition which she knows. Whether such a defensive strategy is ultimately successful cannot be decided here. But insofar as it is integral to the case for KN, this should not dissuade proponents of KN from recognizing EPCN as a norm of assertion.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Jessica Brown, Jacob Busch, Mikkel Gerken, Nikolaj Nottelman, Søren Harnow Klausen, Lasse Nielsen, Caroline Schaffalitzky de Muckadell, and Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen for valuable discussion. Thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers for Synthese for their helpful comments.
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Petersen, E.N. A case for a certainty norm of assertion. Synthese 196, 4691–4710 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1682-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1682-2