The Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA) has received added support recently from data on prompting assertion (Turri 2010) and from a refinement suggesting that assertions ought to express knowledge (Turri 2011). This paper adds another argument from parenthetical positioning, and then argues that KAA's unified explanation of some of the earliest data adduced in its favor recommends KAA over its rivals.
Recent work on testimony and the norms of assertion considers cases of expert testimony. Thinking about expert testimony clarifies which epistemic goods figure in the expectations placed on experts for their knowledge. Examining the distinctive conditions of expert testimony and the assumptions hearers bring to such conversational contexts can provide broader lessons about how knowledge is represented by speakers, and how it is gained by hearers.Expert testimony is the focus of Jennifer Lackey's (2011, 2013) recent arguments over the norm of assertion. Her cases suggest that experts are plausibly held to a different epistemic standard when speaking as experts, where this standard concerns not only the quantity of an expert's epistemic support for what an expert asserts, but also the quality of that epistemic support. These cases seem to count against knowledge being sufficient for epistemically permissible assertion; and several others have followed Lackey in regarding such cases as important to adjudicating the debate over the norms of assertion and practical reasoning (Carter and Gordon 2011, Coffman 2011, McKinnon 2012, Carter 2014, Gerken 2014, Green 2014.I shall argue in this paper that relying on intuitions about such cases of expert testimony introduces several problems concerning expertise, expert knowledge, and the sharing of such knowledge through testimony. In particular, the cases used thus far are unstable, and refinements are needed to clarify exactly what principles are being tested and exactly what our intuitive judgements are tracking in such cases. But as we shall see, once refined, such cases raise more questions than they answer.The plan of this paper is as follows. §1 introduces the sufficiency principle for epistemically permissible assertion, and notes how it does and does not relate to the knowledge norm of assertion. §2 considers Lackey's notion of isolated second-hand knowledge, clarifying various notions of knowledge as 'isolated' and of seeking an expert's opinion. §3 exposes a significant 492 MATTHEW A. BENTON
Epistemology has focused primarily on propositional knowledge, that is, on how it is we can know true propositions, where propositions represent the world as being a certain way, and when true, what is known is simply that the world is a certain way. Thus what is known is the structure of the objective world, that is, of some mind-independent truths, where the paradigm is that of sensory perception. The only kind of knowledge that would be mind-dependent in any sense would be knowledge of the contents of someone's mind. Since it is plausible to think of a mind as part of the world to be known, and since one cannot know the content of a mind unless the mind contains that content, both realism and the factivity of knowledge are upheld even where such truths are in some sense mind-dependent. The present essay considers an underexplored area of epistemology, namely knowledge of persons, and how interpersonal knowledge seems different from knowledge of propositions. If propositional knowledge is a state of mind, consisting in a subject's attitude to a (true) proposition, the account to be developed here thinks of interpersonal knowledge as a state of minds, involving a subject's attitude to another (existing) mind. As shall be seen, this kind of knowledge exhibits a gradability characteristic of context-sensitivity, and an analogue of factivity. Yet it also invokes an epistemology at odds with certain truisms of propositional epistemology, particularly with specific formulations of realism and mind-independence. See especially Williamson (, and : -), and Nagel (). The early twentieth century realists emphasized, against the idealists, that 'knowing makes no difference to what is known,' and that 'knowing in no way alters or modifies the thing known': see Marion (: -) on the Oxford Realists, citing Cook Wilson () and Prichard (: , ). Likewise, they stressed that the object of
, in its propositional construction "I hope that p," is compatible with a stated chance for the speaker that ¬p. On fallibilist construals of knowledge, knowledge is compatible with a chance of being wrong, such that one can know that p even though there is an epistemic chance for one that ¬p. But self-ascriptions of propositional hope that p seem to be incompatible, in some sense, with self-ascriptions of knowing whether p (that is, knowing either that p or that ¬p). Given a very intuitive grasp of the epistemic conditions under which one may hope for some proposition, the data from knowledge's incompatibility with hope generates evidence that fallibilism is false. Yet the infallibilist about knowledge can straightforwardly explain why knowledge would be incompatible with hope, and can explain all of the linguistic data introduced here. This suggests that fallibilists bear an explanatory burden which has been overlooked.In § I introduce several strands of linguistic evidence for the incompatibility between knowledge and hope, and examine whether the incompatibility of their ascriptions is semantic, pragmatic, or rational in nature. I then situate the problem by noting the di erential explanatory resources of infallibilists and fallibilists, and arguing that fallibilists indeed do have a challenge to face here. Because it would be natural for fallibilists to draw upon their explanations given for the parallel problem raised by "concessive" knowledge attributions, in § I consider several prominent fallibilist explanations of them. But I argue that none of those explanations will generalize to account for the data from knowledge-hope incompatibility presented in § , andThere are many ways of spelling out the fallibilist doctrine. My purpose is not to adjudicate them here, but to begin with a general statement of the view. See Reed ( ) and Dougherty ( ) for discussions of fallibilism, and Brown ( ) and Dutant ( ) for di erent ways of characterizing infalliblism.
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