Esben Nedenskov Petersen

A case for a certainty norm of assertion

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.

When Belief Ascriptions Are About More Than What Is on Someone Else's Mind

The third-person belief ascription, “Marie believes that the contract is in the cabinet,” may engender two interpretations: (1) It neutrally describes what is on Maries mind and (2) it offers indirect evidence about reality, committing the speaker to the cabinet as the most likely location. The circumstances that lead to the evidential interpretation are at present not well documented in the case of belief verbs. In the case of belief-dependent verbs with and without embedding clause syntax, for example, “Marie says that the contract is in the archive,” and “Marie is lookingfor the contract in the archive,” it has been claimed that they eschew the evidential interpretation altogether. We explore the influence of the pragmatic context on the third-person, present tense and first-person, past tense use of the verbs, believe, say, and look for. In three experiments that manipulated the discourse context, 258 adults rated written vignettes. Regardless of the verb and the tense, when presented in discourse contexts without prior shared knowledge of the location of the object in question, the belief ascription was interpreted as indirect evidence. The results illuminate the border area between semantics and pragmatics, particularly regarding evidential uses of belief and belief-dependent verbs.

Skepticism and the Prediction Objection

It is an influential and often repeated objection to external world skepticism that skeptical theories lead to implausible predictions about the patterns of ordinary epistemic discourse and thought. Since skepticism entails that we know nothing, or only very little, about the external world, the skeptic seems unable to explain why competent speakers constantly ascribe such knowledge to both themselves and others. Uncontroversial facts about every day communication hence appear to present a strong reason to reject skeptical conditions on knowledge. In this paper, however, I argue that this objection to skepticism underestimates the means that a skeptic has available to account for people’s anti-skeptical assertions and judgments. A modest and highly plausible error theory enables the proponents of a familiar type of skeptical underdetermination principle to provide a compelling explanation of our linguistic and doxastic behavior. So there is a type of skepticism with a powerful response to the charge that skeptical theories lead to unacceptable predictions.