In his work on deduction —35 , Gentzen also introduced the Sequent Calculus, with so-called sequents,. Gentzen originally explained the meaning of the arrow as.
By this explanation a sequent is an ordinary construction of propositional logic. Here there is only a single formula in the succedent. This is a sentence form apt for making claims, and it is correct just if there is exists a Natural Deduction derivation from the assumptions A 1 , …, A n to the conclusion A. So the arrow is no longer to be interpreted as an ordinary implication construction, but indicates that the succedent is derivable from the antecedent, or that the succedent can be asserted on the basis of the antecedent as a sequence of assumptions.
On this interpretation, it is like moving Frege's assertion sign from a sentence initial position, making an assertion depend on assumptions.
The question is how to understand this. In Natural Deduction, as well as in informal reasoning, we make assumptions and infer new propositions on the basis of those assumptions, as in. This natural language rendering of the inference step would in a Natural Deduction setting with the same informal language look like this:. It is clear that assuming that p is something different from asserting that p.
But it is less clear how to regard the concluding. We cannot simply say that it is of a separate kind, namely inferring or concluding that p. For the difference at issue is precisely between inferring something from premises that are already established, or that one at least asserts or believes, in which case one does assert the conclusion, and inferring something from premises that are only assumed.
In the latter case one does not simply assert the conclusion. One suggestion is that the conclusion is conditionally asserted, i. More fully, the idea is that if the premise is true, the conclusion is asserted, and if the premise is false, the conclusion is not asserted, nor advanced in any other way.
This is completely implausible, however. The conclusion may serve as an essential middle step of a longer argument, such as. The conclusion, on the third line, is formed by the rule of implication introduction from the preceding derivation. The conclusion is unconditionally asserted, on the basis of the preceding step from the first to the second line, i.
The intermediate conclusion depends on the assumption, but the final conclusion does not. But suppose that there is no life on Mars. Then, on the conditional assertion understanding, nothing at all is achieved in the second line: no assertion is made, nor any advancing of the proposition in any other way whatsoever. That is, it is as if no inferential step is taken. But that the proposition that there is water on Mars is advanced in some way or other is essential for reaching the final conclusion in the second inference step.
The first step cannot simply be void. Maybe one could see the advancing of the proposition that there is water on Mars, in 5 , as an assertion of the proposition as depending on the the truth of the premise that there is life on Mars. That is, the act taken would be an assertion proper, but the object would not be simply a proposition, but a qua object, the proposition qua depending on the truth of the premise.
But this is not a viable option either, even apart from general doubts about qua objects, since inferring that there is water on Mars from the premise that there is life on Mars in no way implies that the truth of the conclusion depends on the truth of the premise. There might well be water on Mars without any life on Mars, and the speaker who makes the inference is not required to think otherwise.
So neither the truth of the conclusion, nor the assertoric force itself, seems to depend or be conditional on the truth of the premise. It remains, I think, two main alternatives. The first I shall call the Prawitz-Stalnaker alternative, which consists in viewing the conclusion as asserted under an assumption.
This amounts to a generalization of the concept of assertion. Stalnaker , 65 makes an explicit distinction between the concepts of assertion and hypothetical assertion, and the latter is a conclusion drawn from an assumption supposition. It consists in viewing inferring from assumptions as advancing a sequent-like content of the form 3 , i.
It is supposed to be distinct from the assertion of a corresponding propositional implication. These two approaches have complementary virtues and vices as regards conservatism.
The Prawitz-Stalnaker view is closer to the surface form of natural language reasoning. A possible way to flesh out the Prawitz-Stalnaker view is to add the idea that if a speaker S hypothetically asserts that q on the assumption that p and then adds the assertion that p , then S has also, indirectly, asserted categorically that q.
Then, if we look at the little argument 5 , we can see the advancing of the conclusion as an assertion, of the proposition that there is water on Mars, hypothetical in case the premise is only assumed, and categorical in case the premise is itself asserted. In this way we could see hypothetical force as in a sense functional: hypothetical assertoric force is a function that takes a categorical assertion of the premise as argument and yields a categorical assertion of the conclusion as value.
This would be an analogy to functional analyses in other areas, in e. It fits well with regarding force as an abstract category, related to but not identical with elements of speaker psychology. The so-called paradoxes of the material conditional have shown that there are discrepancies between the use of ordinary indicative conditionals, such as. Since the antecedent is false, the material conditional 10 is true, but the conditional 9 does not appear highly assertible.
Not even the fact that we have excellent evidence that the antecedent is false makes us inclined to accept an assertoric use of it. The discrepancies also show up in reasoning, especially in combination with the use of negation. The following is an example from Dorothy Edgington , :.
If the conditional is material, then the negated conditional is equivalent with a conjunction of the antecedent and the negation of the consequent. So understood, the argument is valid. If good evidence for the truth of the material conditional does not make a natural language conditional correctly assertible, what does? Good evidence by subjective standards for the truth of proposition can be equated with high subjective probability for that proposition.
Ernest Adams , —77 proposed that a conditional if A, then B is assertible just if the corresponding conditional subjective probability of B given A , p B A , is high.
Frank Jackson has the following , :. The conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent is low, but the probability of the corresponding material conditional is high, simply because the probability of the falsity of the antecedent and of the truth of the consequent are both high.
As noted above, the standard idea of of correct assertibility is that an assertion is correct provided there is good evidence for the truth of the proposition asserted. In terms of subjective probability, it is correct iff the subjective probability is high.
This equivalence is violated, given Adams' Thesis, if natural language conditionals are material conditionals. Two strategies that have been employed in response are directly relevant for the theory of assertion. The first is to modify the correctness conditions for assertions of conditionals, or even assertions in general. The second is to claim that what looks like an assertion of a proposition expressed by declarative sentence really is a speech act of another type: a conditional assertion.
For S to express an attitude is for S to R -intend the hearer to take S 's utterance as reason to think S has that attitude.
On this view, expressing is wholly a matter of hearer-directed intentions. This proposal has the advantage of covering both the sincere and the insincere case, but has the drawback of requiring a high level of sophistication.
By contrast, Bernard Williams 74 has claimed that a sincere assertion is simply the direct expression of belief, in a more primitive way. Insincere assertions are different. Owens Presumably, the intention mentioned is an intention about what the addressee is to believe about the speaker.
In this case the objection that too much sophistication is required is less pressing, since it only concerns insincere assertions. However, Williams's idea as in Grice has the opposite defect of not taking more sophistication into account. The idea that the alternative to sincerity is the intention to make the addressee believe that the speaker believes what he asserts, is not general enough. There is no definitive upper limit to the sophistication of the deceiving speaker's calculations cf.
Pagin Section 7. In addition, the speaker may simply be stonewalling, reiterating an assertion without any hope of convincing the addressee of anything. A more neutral way of trying to capture the relation between assertion and believing was suggested both by Max Black and by Davidson a: : in asserting that p the speaker represents herself as believing that p.
This suggestion appears to avoid the difficulties with the appeal to hearer-directed intentions. Grammatical moods can have such conventions As one represent oneself as believing, one can also represent oneself as knowing.
Inspired by Davidson's proposal, Peter Unger —70 and Michael Slote made the stronger claim that in asserting that p the speaker represents herself as knowing that p. To a small extent this idea had been anticipated by G. Moore when claiming that the speaker implies that she knows that p However, it is not so clear what representing oneself amounts to. It must be a sense different from that in which one represents the world as having certain features.
The speaker who asserts. By means of answering the question what I believe with an utterance of 22 I do represent myself as believing that there are black swans, equivalently with asserting it.
What I assert then is wrong if I don't have the belief, despite the existence of black swans. The actor says. By means of that, he in one sense represents himself as believing that he is in the biology department.
But the audience is no way invited to believe that the speaker, that is, the actor, has that belief. That it nevertheless tracks a real phenomenon is often claimed to be shown by Moore's Paradox. This is the paradox that assertoric utterances of sentences such as. Among the different types of account of Moore's Paradox, Moore's own emphasizes the connection between asserting and believing. Moore's idea —6 ; 63 was that the speaker in some sense implies that she believes what she asserts.
So by asserting 24 the speaker induces a contradiction between what she asserts and what she implies. This contradiction is then supposed to explain the oddity. Clearly, utterances of sentences like 25 are bad, and some think that they are as bad as the paradigmatic Moorean sentences like Unger —60 ; Slote , and Williamson —5 with application to the knowledge norm.
Linguistic arguments of this kind in general, explicitly or implicitly, have the form of an inference to the best explanation. As such, they are problematic, since there are competing explanations of the badness of Moorean utterances. We return to this topic at end of subsection 6. A definition proposed by Dummett may be seen as a way of cashing in the talk of self-representation:.
Dummett's proposal is presumably intended to give necessary as well as sufficient conditions, but there are problems with both. With the necessary conditions because of the possibility of direct expressions of belief, as urged by Williams, and with sufficiency for reasons of the same kind as discussed at the end of the previous section: a speaker may try to convey the Dummett-type impression in deviant ways.
However, except for the idea that a sincere assertion is the expression of a belief that a speaker actually has, none of these types of account focuses on the cognitive features of representing the world and judging the representation to be true as a main characteristic. A few more cognitively oriented accounts do that. As noted above, Frege held a: 22 that an assertion is an outward sign of a judgment Urteil.
Since for Frege, the truth value is the Reference Bedeutung of a sentence, a judgment is an advance from Sense to Reference. In case the subject makes a mistake, it is not the actual Reference, but anyway the Reference the subject takes it to have. Frege countenanced exactly one point of evaluation: the World. In a sense, judging is applying a content to the World. In this form, the idea generalizes.
If contents are possible-worlds propositions, the points of evaluation are possible worlds. All actual judgments are then applications of propositions to the actual world.
If contents are temporal propositions, true or false with respect to world-time pairs, then all actual judgments are applications to the ordered pair of the actual world and a relevant time, usually the time at which the judgment is made. This is the point with respect to which a sentence, used in a context of utterance, has its truth value cf.
Kaplan Again, the relation is general: if the content of a judgment is a function from indices of some type to truth values, then a judgment is the very step of applying that content to the relevantly actual index.
On this picture, what holds for judgment carries over to assertion. It is in the force of an utterance that the step is taken from the content to the actual point of evaluation.
This view has been stated by Recanati with respect to the actual world :. Recanati Essentially, this is Frege's view: the speaker gives an outer sign of taking the proposition to be true. The question is whether this view can be given a non-metaphorical rendering that improves on the idea of expressing a belief.
Wright Prima facie , it characterizes assertion well. However, there are two problems with the idea. The first is that it should generalize to other speech act types, but does not seem to do so.
For instance, presenting the proposition that Elsa is at home as a proposition that the speaker would like to know the truth value of, leaves it open whether the utterance is interrogative, optative, or imperative:. For if the word is presented as long in the sentence 27 , then also the proposition that snow is white is presented as true in the sentence. It would be instantiated by conjectures, assumptions, and perhaps also by forceless utterances. Another idea for characterizing assertion in terms of truth-related attitudes is that assertion aims at truth.
This is stated, for instance, both by Bernard Williams and by Michael Dummett On Williams's view, the property of aiming at truth is what characterizes fact-stating discourse, as opposed to, e. It is natural to think of. On Williams's view, to regard a sincere utterance of. This view again comes in two versions. On the first alternative, the existence of moral facts renders the discourse fact-stating, whether the speaker thinks so or not, and the non-existence renders it evaluative, again whether the speaker thinks so or not.
On the second alternative, an utterance of 31 is an assertion if the speaker has a realistic attitude towards moral discourse and otherwise not. On these views, it is assumed that truth is a substantial property Williams , not a concept that can be characterized in some deflationary way.
As a consequence, the sentence. Pointing to the difference between fact-stating and evaluative discourse may help to distinguish assertions from evaluations, but does not, again, help to distinguish assertion from other acts within the fact-stating family, such as conjectures and assumptions.
In various forms of relativism , expressions of judgments of personal taste, such as. Common to varieties of relativism with respect to predicates of personal taste is the idea that there is an extra parameter of evaluation, a standard of taste , over and above, say, possible world and time.
Despite the lack of objectivity in a more ordinary sense, such a semantics is typically coupled with treating utterances of sentences such as as assertions cf.
There is, of course, a further question whether such a treatment is appropriate. Perhaps the best way of capturing the cognitive nature of assertion is to to give a theory of the cognitive features of normal communication by means of assertion. A classic theory is Stalnaker's , Stalnaker provides a model of a conversation in which assertion and presupposition dynamically interact.
On Stalnaker's model, propositions are presupposed in a conversation if they are on record as belonging to the common ground between the speakers. When an assertion is made and accepted in the conversation, its content is added to the common ground, and the the truth of the proposition in question will be presupposed in later stages. What is presupposed at a given stage has an effect on the interpretation of new utterances made at that stage. Stalnaker uses a possible worlds framework, and characterizes the common ground as a set of possible worlds the worlds where all that is presupposed is true , the context set.
To assert something incompatible with what is presupposed is self-defeating […] And to assert something which already presupposed is to attempt to do something that is already done. On such an approach, the satisfaction of a presupposition is an admittance condition of an assertion cf. Karttunen ; Heim This idea connects with Austin's more general pragmatic idea of felicity conditions of speech acts.
However, as was already pointed out by Stalnaker 55 , and later stressed in Lewis , an assertion that intuitively presupposes the truth of another proposition need not fail, but can instead have the effect of adjusting the common ground. In so-called accommodation , the hearer adds background assumptions that would be required for interpretation. For instance, upon hearing Lewis utter.
Accommodation is further discussed in Stalnaker , where it is stressed, among other things, that it works, when it works, because of what is already presupposed.
For example 34 , it is presupposed that the speaker knows whether or not he has a cat. Whatever the truth about presupposition accommodation, Stalnaker offers a model of the cognitive features of communication and the role of assertion therein. Does it thereby also offer an account of assertion? The answer is no, for the role of assertion is shared by other speech acts such as assuming and conjecturing.
What is added to the common ground is only for the purpose of conversation, and need not be actually believed by the participants. It is only required that it be accepted cf. Stalnaker Stalnaker has not as far as I am aware attempted to add a distinguishing feature of assertion to the model.
Schaffer proposes to add a topic-sensitive knowledge norm cf. Firstly, they are temporary, which means that they can be revoked when they have served their purpose. Secondly, they do not have the same commitment properties. Another cognitive account is offered by Pagin What this amounts to is different, but complementary, for speaker and hearer. For the speaker, part of the reason for using a particular sentence is that it is true in context ; that is, the speaker believes, with a sufficient strength, that the sentence expresses a true proposition.
For the hearer, taking the utterance as informative, means, by default, to update his credence in the proposition as a response to the utterance, both in the upwards direction and to a level above 0.
The prima facie element of the account means that the typical properties on the speaker and hearer side are only default properties associated with surface features of the utterance: the declarative sentence type, a typical intonation pattern, etc.
There are many possible reasons why a speaker my utter such a sentence without believing the proposition, and why a hearer may not adjust his credence in the typical manner. For example, the speaker may be lying, the hearer may distrust the speaker, or may already have given the proposition a very high credence before the utterance.
On Pagin's picture, it is the cognitive patterns associated with surface features, on the production and comprehension sides, that characterize assertion. This way of dividing the account between speaker and hearer is somewhat controversial. Yet another cognitive account is elaborated in Jary Jary's account is situated within Relevance Theory , a more general account of cognition and communication.
Assertion cannot be defined thus, though. In order for an utterance to have assertoric force, it must also be subject to the cognitive and social safeguards that distinguish assertion. Jary —4. Social safeguards consist in sanctions against misleading assertions, while cognitive safeguards consist in the ability of the hearer to not simply accept what is said but meta-represent the speaker as expressing certain beliefs and intentions It is part of a full account of assertion, according to Jary, that assertions are subject to these safeguards.
Although Jary's account no doubt captures some of the cognitive ingredients in producing and comprehending assertions, it seems also to be a fairly liberal mixture of social character accounts and communicative intentions accounts.
One wonders whether it is impossible to make assertions without the existence of social sanctions, and how plausible it is to suppose the average speaker to intend his utterance to be subject to the hearer's ability to meta-represent the speaker. The idea that language use in general is governed by rules or norms is old and widespread.
That speech acts, as speech acts, are governed by norms, is again a well established idea. The task is then to identify them. In the literature, two very different types of norm have been discussed. One type concerns the decision whether or not an assertion has been made by means of an utterance.
These norms are usually characterized as conventions. The other type concerns conditions of propriety , or correctness , of assertion in some cases actions following an assertion. We shall discuss these two types separately. Austin held that illocutionary acts as opposed to perlocutionary acts are conventional , in the sense that they can be made explicit by the so-called performative formula Austin Presumably, the idea was that a speech act type is conventional just if there exists a convention by which an utterance of a sentence of a certain kind ensures if uptake is secured that a speech act of that type is performed.
Austin probably thought that in virtue of the performative formulas this condition is met by illocutionary but not by perlocutionary act types.
The more general claim that illocutionary force is correlated by convention with sentence type has been advocated by Michael Dummett , On this view, it is a convention that declarative sentences are used for assertion, interrogative for questions and imperative for commands and requests. According to Searle 38, 40 , illocutionary acts are conventional, and the conventions in question govern the use of so-called force-indicating devices Searle 64 specific to each language.
Searle does not claim that the standard sentence types are force indicating devices but speculates that a representation of illocutionary type would be part of the syntactic deep structure.
However, the view that illocutionary acts types are conventional in this sense has met with much opposition. This kind of criticism, now directed against Dummett, has later been reinforced by Robert J.
If Strawson and Stainton are right, convention isn't necessary for making assertions. Moreover, Donald Davidson , a stressed that no conventional sign could work as a force indicator in this sense, since any conventional sign could be used and would be used in insincere utterances, where the corresponding force was missing, including cases of deception, jokes, impersonation and other theatrical performances. Basically the same point is made by Bach and Harnish —7. If Davidson, and Bach and Harnish are right, then conventions are also not sufficient.
This is no doubt correct, but if Davidson and Bach and Harnish are right, it is possible to fake an entire contract signing situation, as a joke or as part of a performance. Within a fake situation, you can also fake the signing, by performing an action that looks just as the genuine signing itself.
The situation is complicated by the fact that the general question of when a convention, or rule of any kind, is in force for a speaker, is substantial and complex cf.
Pagin Chpt. This would still leave it a non-public issue whether an assertion was made. In general, an account of assertion in terms of norms is an account that invokes the existence , or the being in force , of norms that uniquely govern assertions. This is not just a sociological observation. By contrast, if I both say that assertions are actions governed by such and such norms, and that furthermore assertions are in fact made, I have myself taken a normative stance, acknowledging the force of norms.
Does such an acknowledgment come already with classifying assertions as correct or incorrect? Is correctness an inherently normative notion, or is it just descriptive?
According to, for instance, an earlier view of Paul Boghossian , the mere fact that we can evaluate assertions as correct or incorrect shows that words are governed by norms of use. Those preferences may then be explained by wholly external factors, for instance by appeal to social psychology, or the desire for knowledge, but is not internal to the idea of assertion itself. Moreover, even if we are using a genuinely normative notion of correctness, it may well be that the norm in question is not unique to assertion, but governs a broader range of actions, perhaps actions in general, as in the case of moral norms.
We shall return to this latter point. As has often been noted, an assertion can be correct in different respects. For instance, a speaker can say something true but be impolite in saying it, thereby making an assertion that is incorrect with respect to norms of etiquette.
It may also have been immoral, or imprudent, tactically or strategically bad. Moreover, an assertion may have, for instance an implicature that is incorrect, even though the primary act considered in isolation is to be deemed correct.
Sometimes, a distinction is made between aspects of badness that can be eliminated by means of retracting an assertion, and aspects that can't be. I can take back a claim if I find I was wrong, but I cannot eliminate for instance a breach of confidence.
According to Dummett 48 , this distinction is drawn between aspects that concern what is said and aspects that concern the saying of it , respectively compare Kvanvig The relevant notion of correctness, according to Dummett, concerns only what is said.
He adds that. Such a notion was taken on board in pragmatism, and in later forms of anti-realism. John Dewey seems to have been the first to characterize truth in terms of assertoric correctness, with his notion of warranted assertibility , even though this idea had a clear affinity with the verifiability principle of Moritz Schlick Dewey was later followed by, notably, Dummett and Hilary Putnam Common to them is the position that there cannot be anything more to truth than being supported by the best available evidence.
Dewey, following Peirce, regarded truth as the ideal limit of scientific inquiry Dewey , and a proposition warrantedly asserted only when known in virtue of such an inquiry. Warranted assertibility is the property of a proposition for which such knowledge potentially exists 9.
Putnam 54—6 operated with an idea of assertibility under ideal epistemic conditions. Under normal conditions, a speaker can be justified in making an assertion even though what she asserts is false.
The evidence is enough for truth under normal circumstances, but because of abnormal interference the evidence falls short. For instance, improbable changes, say because of a fire, may have taken place after the speaker's observation.
However, in ideal epistemic conditions evidence that is sufficient for justifying an assertion is also conclusive. On Dummett's view, we do get a notion of truth distinct from the notion of a correct assertion only because of the semantics of compound sentences 50—2.
In this case, whether it is correct or not, at the time of utterance, to assert that it will rain, or that it will not rain, is irrelevant to the correctness of an assertoric utterance of the conditional itself. In these early discussions, the strategy was that of getting a handle on truth by means of an appeal to the notion of the correctness of an assertion, which was taken as more fundamental.
The question of what the correctness of an assertion consists in was not itself much discussed, although Dummett 77—8 is careful to distinguish between the case where a speaker makes an assertion on the basis of adequate evidence, and the case where adequate evidence is available , but the speaker makes the assertion without being aware of it.
In the latter case, according to Dummett, the speaker was not correct, but the assertion was. In recent discussions, by contrast, the general strategy has been to get a handle on knowledge , and most of the contributors have been concerned with assertion in the context of investigations in epistemology, often from different epistemological standpoints.
Nevertheless, the scope of the discussion of assertion has increased, with more of a focus on the very question itself: under what conditions is an assertion correct , or proper.
The recent wave of discussion was started by Timothy Williamson , , who proposed that assertion is governed by a norm of assertion. Williamson proposed what has come to be known as the knowledge norm , or knowledge rule :. K-A is proposed as part of an account of assertion. Other norms have been proposed, and some ideas about the role and status of the norm proposed are usually shared.
By N1 , the norm is a norm only for the making of assertions. As a norm of assertion, the norm is in place to govern the making of assertions in general, and to govern nothing else. Knowing what the condition of permissibility is, we will also know what the action type is. This is ruled out by N2. It should be emphasized here that on the norm view, it is being subject to the norm that characterizes assertion, not conforming to the norm. An assertion that violates the norm is still an assertion.
Nothing but an assertion could violate the norm, if the N2 and N3 properties hold. This is a stronger property than N3 , but several of the theorists do claim that their proposed norm has this property. We return below to what constitutivity amounts to. As we shall see, although this is a property everyone agrees on, it has been used in the debate over the intuitive support of some candidate norms over others.
On some understandings of the matter, N6 is simply trivial. However, it is perfectly possible to see some candidate norms as ideals , while the evaluations of individual assertions may take into account various relations between the assertion and the norm over and above conformity. In fact, this has been an issue in the debate, as we shall also see. The positive evaluation requires satisfaction of all relevant norms. If there is only one, this norm cannot be only prohibitive, that is, specify necessary conditions, as does K-A , but should be biconditional, and also give sufficient conditions as well.
A biconditional strengthening of K-A is. Williamson gives only the prohibitive version. The biconditional version is discussed in Hawthorne 23 and Lackey —75 , as well as in Brown and Brown argues against the sufficiency part by means proposed counterexamples.
It may be noted that K2-A is prima facie inconsistent with N5 : if the norm says that an assertion is permissible while another norm says that it is not, we have a contradiction, unless we specify a separate respect in which assertions are assessed with respect to the norm of assertion. As long as the norm is couched in neutral deontic terms, there is a problem.
Merely prohibitive norms do not have this problem, unless in relation to other norms that are themselves biconditional. For the most part, the literature on norms of assertion has concerned the question which the norm of assertion is. That is, it is in general not asked whether there are norms of assertion in some sense or other , what status such norms have, whether they are constitutive, or what constitutivity amounts to.
It is normally taken for granted that there is a norm that holds for all assertions and for assertions specifically the property.
The question is which, and what the reasons are for favoring this or that answer. Some have proposed norms that are similar to K-A , but instead sets the condition in relation to the transmission of knowledge to the hearer. Similar norms have also been proposed by Pelling and by Hinchman Carpintero suggests that his version is preferable to Williamson's because it brings out the social, communicative function of language He argues that only TK-A could be expected to be a convention , and takes that to speak in its favor.
Most alternatives to the knowledge norm that have been proposed are weaker, in requiring less than knowledge. It has been proposed that assertion goes just with truth, just with knowledge, or just with justification. Matthew Weiner proposed a truth norm:. MacFarlane also proposes a truth rule, but requires it to be qualified as being reflective : this means, in the context of MacFarlane's relativism , that the proposition should be true in the context of utterance, as assessed from the same context of utterance.
The belief norm is explicitly stated by Bach Bach directly infers that the norm of assertion is the belief norm from the fact that an assertion is sincere if, and only if, the speaker believes what she asserts.
Exactly what justification amounts to varies between authors. Igor Douven , argues for a norm of rational belief. Several authors have argued that it is the justification itself that is the key to evaluating assertions.
A standard formulation would be. This view has been taken by Jonathan Kvanvig ; — Kvanvig proposes that the relevant concept of justification is such that it is sufficient for knowledge, provided the proposition is both believed and true and the justification is undefeated. These alternatives to the knowledge norm all propose norms with weaker requirements. But a stronger requirement has also been suggested by Stanley :. Stanley also considers as an alternative a subjective certainty norm, where it is the degree of confidence of the speaker that matters, but in the end opts for regarding this norm as derivable from the epistemic certainty norm.
Some authors have proposed norms for what to do after an assertion. MacFarlane holds that a speaker is required to retract an assertion if it turns out not be true, in a context of assessment:.
Again, in MacFarlane's case, this rule is stated in the context of his relativism, with respect to a context of use and a context of assessment. In MacFarlane's theory, assertion is governed jointly by the reflective truth norm and the retraction norm. According to Michael Rescorla , there is no norm at all for proper making of assertions. There are only norms that govern later reactions. He proposes three similar alternatives, which share the idea that when a speaker is challenged with respect to an assertion he has made, he must either defend the assertion or else retract it Rescorla —5.
Many authors have noted that standards for judging assertions vary between contexts, and have proposed to work that into the account. The first to do so was Keith DeRose DeRose argued from the knowledge norm and the varying standards for assertion as premises, to the conclusion that epistemic contextualism is true DeRose's argument has been challenged by several authors.
For instance, Brown points out that the argument depends on the biconditional version K2-A of the knowledge norm, and argues that the sufficiency part is less well supported. Stanley also criticizes DeRose, despite accepting that the standards of proper assertion vary between contexts. According to Stanley, the reason this does not lead to contextualism about knowledge is that assertion is governed by the certainty norm 55—6.
According to Schaffer , on the other hand, knowledge itself is relative to a question under discussion , which is reflected in his version of the knowledge norm Schaffer Some authors who note that standards of proper assertion appears to vary between context suggest that there is not a single norm with a contextual parameter, but rather that different norms apply in different contexts, still governing one and the same speech act type, assertion.
This line has been taken by Jim Stone and by Janet Levin In some contexts knowledge is required, in some contexts something less demanding, such as justified belief. Patrick Greenough takes this line even further by proposing norm-relativism : what norm is relevant for an assertion in a context is relative to a perspective. One question that arises with respect to such views is this: if the speech act type is individuated by the norm governing it, and norms of utterances vary between contexts, is it then still the case that one and the same illocutionary speech act type is performed across contexts.
One who has denied this is John Turri The first is weaker and the third stronger than assertion. In contexts with different demands on credibility, different speech acts are performed. For assertion itself, the standard is invariant, it is simply knowledge. Turri uses this view to counter DeRose's argument for epistemic contextualism. A more radical conclusion from the assumed normative variation has been drawn by Herman Cappelen According to Cappelen, the proper conclusion is that assertion as a speech act type doesn't exist.
The picture is complicated even further by the fact that many accounts recognize more than one evaluation of assertions. Asked 6 years, 7 months ago. Active 6 years, 7 months ago. Viewed 8k times. Improve this question. Prashere Prashere 1 1 silver badge 3 3 bronze badges. I assume you haven't compared the dictionary definitions of the two words.
I assert that the distinction is obvious, so I'm closevoting for lack of evidence of prior research. Add a comment.
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