Rachel McKinnon

The Lottery Paradox

As I’ve noted, there are essentially four primary forms of support for the Knowledge Norm, and we can envision them like the legs of a four-legged stool.1 They are: the Lottery Paradox, Moore’s Paradox, challenges such as “How do you know?”, and the relationship between norms and goals. The purpose of this chapter is to break off one of those legs of support, the Lottery Paradox. Statements about lotteries raise parallel problems for epistemologists who want to articulate conditions for knowledge and those working on norms of assertion.2 In fact, the role of the lottery paradox is central in various arguments for the Knowledge Norm. So anyone attempting to argue for an alternate norm of assertion must deal with these arguments. The central concern is whether one can know or warrantedly assert sentences like: (A) Ticket n will lose before the draw is made.3 A growing consensus has formed that (A) and propositions like it are neither knowable nor assertible. Some writers on the topic, such as Timothy Williamson, have argued that this fact is best explained by, and thus provides evidence for, the Knowledge Norm.

This paper took too long to write: A puzzle about overcoming weakness of will

The most discussed puzzle about weakness of will (WoW) is how it is possible: how can a person freely and intentionally perform actions that she judges she ought not perform, or that she has resolved not to perform? In this paper, we are concerned with a much less discussed puzzle about WoW—how is overcoming it possible? We explain some of the ways in which previously weak-willed agents manage to overcome their weakness. Some of these are relatively straightforward—as agents learn of the real costs of weakness, or as those costs mount dramatically, they can become strongly motivated to do what they already judged best. But other cases are more difficult to explain: sometimes, agents with a long history of forming and then weakly abandoning resolutions manage to stick to their guns. We argue that these cases can be explained by combining George Ainslies model of agents as multiple preference orderings competing in game theoretic interactions along with the insights of evolutionary game theory. This can explain the puzzling cases where agents suddenly adopt successful strategies for avoiding weak-willed behavior, especially where agents gain no new information about themselves or the consequences of their actions.

Norms of Assertion and Normativity

Since the central concern of this book is the furthering of our understanding of the norms of assertion, it will be helpful to say something about what is meant by something being a norm. This is important, since much of what will be said about arguments for and against various proposed norms will depend on what sense of norm is being used. This chapter discusses how the norms of assertion have been typically conceived in the norms of assertion literature. While there are potentially many parallel debates concerning the nature of norms, since this book is about the norms of assertion and what has been said on that topic, I will largely ignore the parallel debates.

Supporting the Supportive Reasons Norm

My case for the Supportive Reasons Norm is almost complete. As I’ve presented it, the case for the Knowledge Norm is roughly a four-legged stool composed of two different kinds of arguments. The first is an inference to the best explanation, and the second is a theoretical argument about the nature of norms. The first three legs comprising the inference to the best explanation are the lottery paradox, Moore’s paradox, and challenges such as “How do you know?”; the fourth leg is the theoretical considerations of the connection between norms and goals. My aim in Chapters 5 through 8 was to take on each of these legs of the KN argument, one by one, knocking them out. Although one of my purposes was to argue how each of these lines of argument doesn’t uniquely support KN, another was to show how many of these lines of argument actually better support a reasons-based norm such as SRN.

Moore’s Paradox

Moore‘s Paradox is another important part of the debates over the norms of assertion.1 It is generally uncontroversial that assertions such as, “It‘s raining, but I don‘t believe that it‘s raining,” are, as Moore put it, “absurd.” Call such assertions, and their attendant absurdity, Moorean. When it comes to evaluating competing proposals regarding the norms of assertion, it is widely held that adequately explaining the absurdity of Moorean assertions is a virtue. It has also been alleged by advocates of various norms of assertion — in particular, by advocates of the Knowledge Norm — that their view is especially well-positioned to explain Moorean absurdity. In many cases, Moore‘s Paradox has been a central battleground between competing proposals for the central norm of assertion. In this chapter, I argue that several competing norms of assertion can well explain Moorean absurdity, in which case none gains a comparative advantage. Moreover, we don’t even need to appeal to any particular norm of assertion in order to explain the unassertibility of Moorean sentences. Consequently, the capacity of a norm to explain Moorean absurdity is better thought of as an adequacy condition for a proposed norm of assertion. That is, any candidate norm must be at least consistent with what explains the unassertibility of Moorean sentences.

The Supportive Reasons Norm

In this chapter I first present my proposal for the central norm governing the practice of assertion, which I call the Supportive Reasons Norm (SRN).1 One of the distinctive features of the norm is that what it takes to satisfy the norm changes with shifts in assertoric context. In fact, in some special contexts, the norm licenses speakers to assert what they know to be false. Moreover, by properly understanding the social importance of the practice of asserting, we can recognize that there are conventional and pragmatic features internal to the practice. These internal features should be made explicit in our articulation of the norm, and not treated as inessential to it. This feature of my view sets it apart from views such as Williamson’s (2000) simple Knowledge Norm as well as other extant proposals of reasons-based norms such as Jennifer Lackey’s (2007) Reasonable-to-Believe Norm (RTBN) and Igor Douven’s (2006) Rational Credibility Rule (RCR).2 Here, I offer a preliminary defense of the view. I save the more complete defense of the view for Chapters 8 and 9. I begin with a brief presentation of SRN. I then turn in section 3 to present a case of a warranted false assertion. In section 4, I return to more clearly explicate a number of key concepts of SRN not addressed in section 2.

“How Do You Know?” and Challenges to Assertion

In addition to the Lottery Paradox and Moore’s Paradox, the third central leg in the argument for the Knowledge Norm involves the wide propriety of challenges to assertions, particularly “How do you know?”1 Typically, KN advocates have argued that “How do you know?” directly challenges whether a speaker knows what she asserts. And, moreover, the wide propriety of challenging a speaker’s assertion with “How do you know?” clearly indicates that one ought to assert only if one knows. So, if knowledge is not the norm of assertion, why would this be such a widely appropriate challenge?

Gender, Power, and the Norms of Indirect Assertion

For the most part, the norms of assertion literature has focused only on what proposition the speaker expresses by a particular assertion, and on what epistemic standing the speaker has with respect to the proposition expressed by the assertion. While some including myself consider extra-propositional content relevant to whether, all things considered, a particular assertion is warranted — such as whether the assertion is polite or prudent — most have taken up Williamson’s project in articulating “simple” norms of assertion that consider such features external to the norm of assertion.

Speech Acts and Assertion

Asserting is one of many acts we can perform in uttering words. We find assertions everywhere in our daily discourse when we give directions, answer questions, offer our opinions, and when we make arguments. But what is an assertion and what separates it from other speech acts such as requesting, conjecturing, and commanding?

The Norms of Assertion

A topic of lively debate in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of language is what norms might govern our linguistic practice of asserting. When we tell each other things, such as that it will probably rain tomorrow, we’re asserting. There’s an intuitive sense in which some assertions are good, whereas others are bad. Lies, for example, seem like good candidates for things we shouldn’t say. But what’s the difference between honest truth-telling and lying? Are all false assertions bad assertions? These questions concern whether there are any standards governing what it takes to assert well. We call these standards norms . And so the debate about what, if any, norms govern the linguistic practice of assertion is known as the norms of assertion debate. When one’s assertion satisfies the norm, we say that the assertion is warranted.