Abstract
Moore’s paradox is the fact that assertions or beliefs such as
Bangkok is the capital of Thailand but I do not believe that Bangkok is the capital of Thailand
or
Bangkok is the capital of Thailand but I believe that Bangkok is not the capital of Thailand
are ‘absurd’ yet possibly true. The current orthodoxy is that an explanation of the absurdity should first start with belief, on the assumption that once the absurdity in belief has been explained then this will translate into an explanation of the absurdity in assertion. This assumption gives explanatory priority to belief over assertion. I show that the translation involved is much trickier than might at first appear. It is simplistic to think that Moorean absurdity in assertion is always a subsidiary product of the absurdity in belief, even when the absurdity is conceived as irrationality. Instead we should aim for explanations of Moorean absurdity in assertion and in belief that are independent even if related, while bearing in mind that some forms of irrationality may be forms of absurdity even if not conversely.
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Notes
Formalizing ‘I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I do not believe that I did’ as ‘p & I do not believe that p’ turns ‘I believe that he has gone out, but he has not’ into ‘I believe that p & not-p’. This commutes to ‘not-p & I believe that p’, which may be instantiated as ‘p & I believe that not-p’.
There are other utterances of the forms ‘p & I do not believe that p’ or ‘p & I believe that not-p’ that are not absurd because they are not assertions. See Green and Williams (2007, 8).
See Green and Williams (2007, 11–29) for a survey.
It is worth noting that it might be practically rational to assert what is practically irrational to believe, since I might sensibly tell you that any decision I make will turn out for the worse if I have the sensible aim of deceiving you into thinking that I am bad at making decisions, say to avoid the burden of leadership.
Rosenthal claims that lies are not genuine assertions but are rather bits of play-acting (1995, fn 15, 208) and that insincere speech is ‘pretend speech’ (2010, 25). But then it would follow that I could refute the accusation that I have told you a lie by merely admitting that I was lying, for then I could not have told you anything. In contrast, a genuine case of pretending to speak arises when I utter nonsense that vaguely sounds like Russian in order to make you laugh.
I owe this suggestion to Claudio de Almeida.
I owe this sort of example to Claudio de Almeida.
There are exceptions. Williams (2007, 154–155) gives cases of assertion in which one does not try to make one’s interlocutor accept its truth. In one case I aim to ‘wind you up’. I know that you think highly of Obama’s competence, an opinion I in fact share. Nonetheless I insincerely state that Obama is incompetent in order to ‘rattle your cage’. The second case is a double-bluff. Learning that you have just discovered that I am a habitual liar, I decide to tell you the truth for once. So when you ask me if the pubs are still open, I tell you the truth that they are, in order to deceive you into mistakenly thinking that they are not. The first case is not a lie because I do not intend to make you have the mistaken belief—or even the belief—that Obama is incompetent. The second case is not a lie because I do not intend to make you think that my assertion that the pubs are still open is true.
There is at least one other condition, namely the intention to deceive.
The reference to specific beliefs avoids the objection that rationality does not require all one’s beliefs to be true. For example, some claim the preface paradox to be a case in which rationality demands that one has inconsistent beliefs. It might be objected that it is too easy to comply with this norm. Just form no beliefs! But another norm is surely ‘Form beliefs’, a welcome norm not only for any apprentice of practical wisdom but for anyone who accepts the overarching norm ‘Seek truth’. Both of these practical norms aim at epistemic and practical benefit.
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Acknowledgments
I am especially indebted to Claudio de Almeida for helpful and incisive criticism. In particular, his point that one should distinguish epistemic from practical rationality helped me to substantially rethink the structure of this paper.
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Williams, J.N. Moore’s paradox and the priority of belief thesis. Philos Stud 165, 1117–1138 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9997-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9997-1