in defense of assertion

In defense of assertion

Brian Montgomery

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Abstract Herman Cappelen has recently argued in favor of what he calls ‘‘the no

assertion view’’, where the putative speech act is replaced with Paul Grice’s cate-

gory of ‘sayings’. To make his case, Cappelen produces four arguments against

Timothy Williamson’s normative view of assertion, holding that the same argu-

ments can be used mutatis mutandis against other non-normative views of assertion.

In this paper I examine all four of Cappelen’s arguments against normative theories

of assertion, and conclude that they fail.

Keywords Speech acts � Norm of assertion � Assertion � Conversational maxims �Moore’s paradox

Assertion has played an indispensible role in the philosophy of language since the

days of Frege and Russell, and so it has been with minor variations for quite some

time now. However, in a recent essay, Herman Cappelen presents a compelling case

against this tradition. As he argues, not only are assertions unnecessary in speech act

theory, but they are merely ‘‘a philosopher’s invention’’. His strategy for showing

this is simple. As he sees it, Timothy Williamson’s normative theory of assertion

[N-Theory], which holds that one ought to assert p only if one stands in a certain

epistemic relation to p, is the primary alternative to his nihilistic view of assertion.

Cappelen offers four arguments against N-Theories and reasons that the same

general strategies that he employs against them can be used against any view of

assertion. Hence, his own theory, the ‘‘No-Assertion’’ view, where the Gricean

notion of ‘saying’ is all that is needed to explain the phenomena associated with

B. Montgomery (&)

Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL, USA

e-mail: [email protected]

123

Philos Stud

DOI 10.1007/s11098-013-0273-9

putative assertions, is the last theory standing. In what follows I will argue that all

four of Cappellen’s arguments against N-Theories fail.

However, before we move on, perhaps a little background is in order. In

Knowledge and its Limits, Williamson argues that assertions are governed by the

following rule, where C stands for the epistemic relation that the speaker bears to

the proposition being asserted:

(The C Rule): One must: assert p only if p has C. (Williamson 2000, p. 241)

According to Williamson, the C Rule is constitutive of the act of assertion. As he tells

us, a rule is constitutive of an action so long as that rule governs every instance of that

act. His analogy with games is particularly telling here. If a certain rule is necessary

for, say, playing chess rather than some other game, then that rule is constitutive of it.

Williamson also recognizes that even though the C Rule governs all acts of

assertion, it still may be permissibly violated. To borrow an example from him,

imagine a situation where you’re train is moments away from departing. In this

scenario, I have a reasonable belief concerning which train is yours, but I lack

knowledge and therefore violate his preferred candidate for the C Rule. Williamson

reasons that although such an assertion violates the epistemic norm of assertion, it is

nevertheless permissible to make as you have enough non-assertive reasons to do so.

More specifically, Williamson argues that ‘‘norms not specific to assertion’’ gives

one warrant to make to say this. While there are various norms that can make an

assertion conversationally appropriate in Williamson’s picture, only one of them is

unique to the act of assertion itself. Each of these norms provides us with a prima

facie duty concerning assertions, but given the contextually salient features of each

situation, some of them, including the knowledge norm may be overridden.

1 Modal variability

As Cappelen tells us, it would be natural for a proponent of an N-Theory to argue

for it by giving a modal defense of her thesis, yet no one has done this. Since

Williamson holds that constitutive rules necessarily govern the acts that they are

associated with, it would behoove N-Theorists to make their case that this rule

governs assertions across possible worlds.1 Unfortunately, reasons Cappelen, it does

not. Using ‘R’ to express an unspecified epistemic relation between speaker and

proposition, we can formalize his argument as follows:

(1) I can conceive of worlds in which R is not the norm of assertion.

(2) Therefore, there are possible worlds where R is not the norm of

assertion.2

1 As he tells us, ‘‘…if it is a constitutive rule that one must /, then it is necessary that one must /’’

(Williamson 2000, p. 239).2 Of course most of us take Saul Kripke to have shown the move from (1) to (2) to be fallacious. However,

it does seem to be the one that Cappelen employs when he says, ‘‘If conceivability is a guide to possibility

and we can conceive of paradigmatic assertions as governed by norms other than [the knowledge norm],

we have evidence against N-theories.’’ (Cappelen 2011, p. 30. Italics removed from original).

B. Montgomery

123

(3) If there are possible worlds where R is not the norm of assertion, then

N-theories are wrong.

(4) Therefore, N-theories are wrong.

This argument, as I take it, can be repeated for any proposed N-Theory, where

assertion is governed by belief, warranted belief, certainty, etc. and establishes its

conclusion through repeated applications. All that we have to do is find some

logically possible world where that particular epistemic state is not assertion’s

governing norm and we have a case against that norm. Once we run out of purported

norms, the N-Theory account collapses.

Leaving aside the problems associated with conceivability arguments, we find

that his second premise faces a different difficulty. If he’s correct and there is modal

variability of norms, then we would expect worlds where Moorean assertions of the

form ‘‘p, but I don’t R that p’’ to come out as felicitous. Hence, if Cappelen lived in

a truth-norm governed world, then there would be nothing infelicitous about her

saying, ‘‘It’s raining, but I don’t believe that it is.’’ Similarly, if he lived in a world

in which knowledge is the norm of assertion, then he could felicitously utter, ‘‘It’s

raining, but I don’t believe that it is.’’ Yet, he cannot felicitously say either of these

conjunctions regardless of what world he lives in.

Cappelen has a readymade response to this objection. As he tells us, there are

other Moore-style assertions that ought to trigger in us the intuition that ‘‘something

is wrong’’ with them:

• p, but I do not want you to believe that p.

• p, but p is irrelevant to what we are talking about.

• p, but p does not answer the question that you asked.

• p, but p is very misleading.

• p, but I am not willing to defend p if you raise objections to p and I am not

willing to withdraw p if you give me evidence against p.

• p, but I am not certain that p. (Cappelen 2011, p. 38)

What’s important to in these examples, according to Cappelen, is that while we take

something to be amiss with them, we do not suppose that it is because they’ve

broken a constitutive rule of assertion. Since this is so, why, he asks, should we

assume that a constitutive rule of assertion is violated by saying ‘‘p, but I don’t

know that p’’?

Cappelen attempts to buttress his case by arguing that the queerness of at least

three of these examples can be explained by appeal to Gricean maxims. For

instance, saying ‘‘p, but p is irrelevant to what we are talking about’’, I have

straightforwardly violated the maxim of relevance when I present myself as

following it in the first conjunct, but deny it in the second. Similarly, he reasons that

since we can explain the oddity of ‘‘p, but I don’t know that p’’ by appeal to Grice’s

maxim of quality it is therefore not constitutive of the act of assertion.

Yet, as he notes, the defender of N-Theories has an apparent response:

You might object: of course we can explain what is wrong about ‘‘p, but I do

not know that p’’ by appeal to the maxim of quality, but that is just because the

maxim of quality is the knowledge norm of assertion (at least given some


123

interpretations of ‘‘adequate justification’’). To appeal to the maxim of quality

is pretty much to give Williamson’s explanation. So why does this not just play

into Williamson’s hands? The answer is this: we are looking for a reason to

think that the feeling triggered by ‘‘p, but I do not know that p’’ is revealing of

the essence of assertion—that it is revealing of a norm constitutive of the act. I

have assumed throughout that Gricean govern or guide cooperative linguistic

behavior and are not constitutive of the behavior they govern. Of course, you

could object to this. Maybe the maxim of quality has a special status and is

constitutive of the acts that it governs. But, and this is the key point in this

context, the argument for that claim cannot be the bad conjunctions (since all

the maxims give rise to bad conjunctions).3 (Cappelen 2011, p. 39. Italics in

original)

Here Cappelen is both right and wrong. Right in that there are good reasons to

assume that the maxim of quality has a special status that is constitutive of assertion,

but wrong in that Moorean assertions do give us an insight into constitutive norms.

Let’s start with the first claim. Why does the maxim of quality have a status above

and beyond the other conversational maxims? The obvious place to look for an

answer to this question is in Grice’s work. As he tells us, the first submaxim of

quality, the duty to ‘‘Do not say what you believe to be false’’ is of such great

importance that it and the supermaxim itself are conceptually prior to other maxims.

Put another way, the maxim of quality is, in Grice’s model, the single feature that

make’s linguistic communication possible:

It is obvious that the observance of some of these maxims is a matter of less

urgency than is the observance of others; a man who has expressed himself

with undue prolixity would, in general, be open to milder comment than would

a man who has said something he believes to be false. Indeed, it might be felt

that the importance of at least the first maxim of Quality is such that it should

not be included in a scheme of the kind I am constructing; other maxims come

into operation only on the assumption that this maxim of Quality is satisfied.4

(Grice 1989, p. 27. Emphasis added)

3 Cappelen’s final point in the above quotation, the one that he tells us is ‘‘the key point’’ of his argument

seems to be a bit of a red herring. Yes, he is correct in saying that any maxim could give rise to a bad

conjunction. I could make a bad conjunction by saying, ‘‘p, but perhaps that’s too much information’’ and

thereby violate the maxim of quantity or say ‘‘p, but perhaps that is a bit too obscure’’ and violate the

maxim of manner, or ‘‘p, but I suppose that that’s not relevant’’ and hence have violated the maxim of

relation. Yet, these statements strike me at least as being somewhat awkward rather than infelicitous.

Indeed, they seem to be easily inserted into dialogues. Moorean violations of quality, however, do not.

They alone are infelicitous violations of conversational maxims. This by itself should cast doubt on

Cappelen’s argument.4 Also:

The maxims do not seem to be coordinate. The maxim of Quality, enjoining the provision of

contributions which are genuine rather than spurious (truthful rather than mendacious), does not

seem to be just one among a number of recipes for producing contributions; it seems rather to spell

out the difference between something’s being, and (strictly speaking) failing to be, any kind of

contribution at all. False information is not an inferior kind of information; it just is not

information. (Grice 1989, p. 371, Emphasis added).

B. Montgomery

123

Grice’s point in the above passages is that speakers who fail to observe the maxim

of quality (or at a minimum its first submaxim) fail to make a proper contribution as

a speaker in an exchange. They may make a contribution by lying or saying

something that they are not justified in believing, but it will not be what is required

out of the speaker in this particular conversational context. But, isn’t this just the

knowledge norm of assertion? Does it not say that assertions that lack some

necessary epistemic ingredient are similarly deficient? It does, and because it does,

it is difficult to see how the maxim of quality and the knowledge norm of assertion

are not two roads that lead to the same destination.

So, if I am correct, then the epistemic norms invoked by Williamson and others

are really pragmatic norms of assertion. This may be so, but we could ask why the

norm of assertion, whatever it may be (i.e. belief, knowledge, etc.), is constitutive of

assertion? To put this another way some constitutive rules are primitive, admitting

of no deeper analysis than ‘‘that’s just the way things are’’. In this way, many of the

rules of a game seem to be brute rules. The fact that a knight moves in a L shape in

chess doesn’t rely on any particular feature of the game (with the possible exception

of the game’s creators having run out of interesting patterns of movement when

assigning rules to the other pieces). There is no reason why the knight’s L move is a

constitutive rule of chess: it just is. However, some constitutive rules are grounded

in further features of the game. Take the rules against throwing a beanball in

baseball for instance. While it is tempting to understand such rules as the rules of

baseball play, we have to remember that rules like this don’t tell the pitcher how to

play well, rather they tell the pitcher the governing norms of how to play the game.

Hence, it is a constitutive rule of playing baseball, but it is also not brute. Rules like

the no beanball rule or no roughing the passer rule in football are explicable in terms

of further goals extrinsic to the game, in this case not hurting a player. Once we

realize that there are brute and non-brute constitutive rules of games, we find that

there are a plethora of each that compose almost any game.5

So the natural question to ask now is what sort of rule is the norm of assertion. Is

it a brute rule of assertion or is it the result of some further fact of our

communication. I want to suggest the latter, that there is an explanation for why the

C Rule is constitutive of assertion. The rule stems from what Pascal Engel calls the

‘‘self-presentation account of assertion’’ and Hindriks calls the ‘‘norm of sincer-

ity’’.6 While there is no generally accepted name for this theory, it has been at least

implicitly recognized since Frege and received a full formulation in analyses of

Moorean assertions. In his work on epistemic logic, Jaako Hintika argues that the

fact that Moorean assertions seem in some sense odd, infelicitous, or outright

contradictory point us in the direction of the conclusion that an assertion of

p presupposes a belief in the truth of p. ‘‘What is violated by uttering [p, but I do not

believe that p]’’, Hintikka reasons, ‘‘is not logical consistency…but rather the

general presumption that the speaker believes or at least can conceivably believe

5 Sports seem to be for more likely to contain both kinds of constitutive rules. Other games, like chess for

instance, can plausibly be understood as containing only brute constitutive rules.6 Engel (2008) and Hindriks (2007).


123

what he says’’.7 Put another way, the self-presentation account of assertion arises

because of this presupposition, the presupposition that is explicitly violated in

Moorean assertions.

While Moorean assertions certainly point to the truth of Hintikka’s thesis, by

themselves they do not show that Moorean assertions give us insight into the nature

of assertion. In order to make this further connection, let’s return to Grice’s analysis

of the maxim of quality. Grice holds that asserting without fulfilling the maxim of

quality would be akin to sabotage. ‘‘I expect your contributions to be genuine and

not spurious,’’ Grice tells us, ‘‘If I need sugar as an ingredient in the cake you are

assisting me to make it, I do not expect you to hand me salt; if I need a spoon, I do

not expect a trick spoon made of rubber’’ (Grice 1989, p. 28). The basic idea

underlying this is that there is a kind of analogy between the action of jointly baking

a cake on the one hand, and a conversation on the other. Both are cooperative

enterprises that can fail if one of the participants violates the rules. Just as I can

destroy the cake by handing you the wrong ingredient, I can frustrate the goals and

purposes of our conversation by flaunting a presupposition.8

7 Hintikka (1962, p. 67). Now, in claiming that belief in the truth of p is presupposed by a normal

conversational use of p, we run into an immediate problem. As Stalnaker notes, pragmatic

presuppositions typically come about by way of a presupposition trigger, words like, ‘‘few, even, only,

stop, accuse, refuse, admit, confess, pretend, continue, resume, before, and after’’ (Stalnaker 1973, p. 448.

See Levin 1983, pp. 181–185 for a much more thorough list). However, we have nothing like that in this

case. Instead, we seem to have a presupposition that is not triggered by a single word or clause in the

sentence, but rather by the sentence itself. How plausible is this? As it turns out this is possible under at

least some understandings of presuppositions. Consider the following definitions of presupposition:

A speaker presupposes that P at a given moment in a conversation just in case he is he is disposed

to act, in his linguistic behavior, as if he takes the truth of P for granted, and as if he assumes that

his audience recognizes that he is doing so (Ibid., Italics removed from original).

If at time t something is said that requires presupposition P to be acceptable, and if P is not

presupposed just before t, then—ceteris paribus and within certain limits—presupposition

P comes into existence at t (Lewis 1979, p. 340).

A member S of a conversation presupposes a proposition P at time t iff at t S believes or assumes:

a. P;

b. that the other members of the conversation also believe or assume P; and

c. that the other members of the conversation recognize that S believes or assumes (a) and (b) (Soames

1982, p. 485).

The point here is not that one of these definitions is the correct account of presupposition, but rather that

regardless of which theory we choose, it seems that the global presupposition of belief in p is compatible

with the account given regardless of the missing trigger. The existence of this presupposition can further

be inferred by the fact, that as Peter Unger and Timothy Williamson have both noted, when we challenge

an assertion of p we often do so by questioning the quality of the asserter’s epistemic standing in relation

to p. Hence, ‘‘Do you really believe that?’’ or perhaps the stronger ‘‘How do you know that?’’ can be

appropriate replies to a rather shocking or apparently incorrect declaration of p. These responses simply

would not make any sense if S’s belief that p was not presupposed by her assertion of p. Therefore, if

Stalnaker’s analysis of the phenomena is correct, then this particular presupposition is a propositional

attitude about a propositional attitude.8 I can arguably frustrate the goals of a conversation by also refusing to stay on topic, that is by flaunting

the only submaxim of relation. However, there is still the undeniably intuitive result that we can still be

following a norm-governed rule of assertion if we fly off topic, but that we cannot do so if we assert

falsely.

B. Montgomery

123

To see why, let’s start with an uncontroversial example. Imagine that I assert:

(1) Norman no longer cheats on tests.

While it does not semantically imply it, (1) does pragmatically presuppose the truth

of (2):

(2) Norman has cheated on tests in the past.

If I were to utter (1) without believing it—perhaps I misspoke or intended to convey

something false—then (assuming the falsity of (2)) I will have produced a false

belief in (2) to you. If we take the goal of a conversation as the imparting of a true

belief (at least a belief that I hold), then I will have failed at my normative

obligation. Producing this false belief in you would the equivalent of giving you a

rubber spoon. I will have appeared to have fulfilled my duties, but actually frustrated

the shared goal. It would leave us in an even worse epistemic standing than when we

began because we would never know whether the speaker had adequate evidence for

and what she did not.

Given this it is not only reasonable to say that the maxim of quality and the norm

of assertion are one and the same, but it is also the only plausible conclusion. Since

the maxim of quality is constitutive of both Gricean sayings and assertions in a way

that none of the other maxims are, the ‘‘bad conjunctions’’ that explicitly violate the

maxim of quality ought to give us insight into the act of ‘saying’ or ‘asserting’ itself.

Therefore, a theory that holds that bad conjunctions are modally variable is

implausible.

2 The actual variability of norms

Cappelen’s second argument comes from what sees as the actual variability of

assertive norms. As anyone familiar with the history of norms of assertion debate

knows, one of the most common responses to Williamson has been to come up with

putative counterexamples to the knowledge norm. Cappelen describes the

phenomenon as such:

(i) The default norms governing the utterance of declaratives is kept as it

actually is (i.e. it is not part of the thought experiment that the default

norm is varied).

(ii) There’s an (apparently) default utterance of a declarative sentence that

violates [some norm].

(iii) We have no sense that the speaker broke a rule, cheated or is in any way

blameworthy. (Cappelen 2011, p. 32. Italics in original.)

According to Cappelen, this debate suffices to show that ‘‘no one simple norm by

default governs the saying of declarative sentences’’ (Ibid. Italics in original). As he

sees it, the norms are then highly disjunctive or operate as a function of context to


123

norms. Since he sees both options as highly improbable, he reasons that N-Theories

themselves are to blame.

While the contextualization of norms that Cappelen considers may ultimately

suffice to rescue N-Theories, there is a simpler response that he overlooks, one that

allows us to deny that these purported counterexamples demonstrate the fact that

there is no one norm governing all assertions. At the beginning of this paper, we saw

that Williamson holds something akin to the equivalent of intuitionism in ethics. As

he argued, there are some instances where it is all-things-considered appropriate to

violate one norm, say a constitutive norm of assertion, in order to satisfy other non-

assertive norms. Going this route allows us to sidestep the contextualist response

and will show that these aren’t actually counterexamples at all. Why? Because the C

Rule still applies. In these cases it has merely been overridden by other norms.

In the appendix to his paper, Cappelen considers four cases let us briefly consider

each and see if any are permissible violations of the knowledge norm:

Case 1: Lively Philosophy Seminar: In lively philosophy seminars we

regularly find ourselves arguing for positions that we do not believe to be true,

we are simply trying them out. Here is a real case from a recent seminar at

Arche: I said that when we utter sentences containing epistemic modals, we

express different contents relative to different interpreters. I spent about an

hour defending this view against fierce opposition. It is a view that I wanted to

try out—not a view I believe to be true—I am uncertain about its truth value.

Starting out I was not even sure that I would be able to defend it properly, but I

took the commitment to do so. (2011, p. 43)

Case 2: Selfless Assertions: Stella is a devoutly Christian fourth-grade

teacher, and her religious beliefs are grounded in a deep faith that she has had

since she was a child. Part of this faith includes a belief in the truth of

creationism and, accordingly, a belief in the falsity of evolutionary theory.

Despite this, Stella fully recognizes that there is an overwhelming amount of

scientific evidence against both of these beliefs. Indeed, she readily admits that

she is not basing her commitment to creationism on evidence at all but, rather,

on the personal faith that she has in an all-powerful Creator. Because of this,

Stella does not think that religion is something that she should impose on those

around her, and this is especially true with respect to her fourth-grade students.

Instead, she regards her duty as a teacher to include presenting material that is

best supported by the available evidence, which certainly includes the truth of

evolutionary theory. As a result, while presenting her biology lesson today,

Stella asserts to her students, ‘‘Modern day Homo sapiens evolved from Homo

erectus,’’ though she herself neither believes nor knows this proposition.

(2011, pp. 42–43)

Case 3: Guesses and Hunches: Consider two people walking around a city

trying to find their way back to a restaurant they have been to the evening

before. They are both a bit lost, but there are no high stakes—they have got

plenty of time and it is a nice evening to walk around. At a certain point Mia

has three options to choose amongst: block a, b, or c. For no particular good

B. Montgomery

123

reason, she says that the restaurant is on block b (maybe she would describe

this as a ‘‘hunch,’’ but it is not essential to the case that she does). (2011, p. 43)

Case 4: Justified False Beliefs: It is winter, and it looks exactly as it would if

there were snow outside, but in fact that white stuff is not snow, but foam put

there by a film crew of whose existence I have no idea. I do not know that

there is no snow outside, but it is quite reasonable for me to believe not just

that there is snow outside but that I know that there is; for me it is to all

appearances a banal case of perceptual knowledge. Surely it is then reasonable

to assert that there is snow outside. (2011, p. 43)9

To defend these cases as legitimate violations of purported norms, Cappelen

considers three possible responses on behalf of the N-theorist in his appendix. While

I won’t defend any of those, I shall argue that the apparent rightness of the

assertions in the first three examples can be explained by the knowledge norm being

overridden by other norms. Consider the first example. Just as there are different

norms governing conversations in, say, antagonistic contexts like courtroom

examinations, there can conceivably be different norms that govern how one should

behave in a seminar. Indeed, this seems eminently plausible if we take the goal of a

normal conversational context to be the transmission of belief (or knowledge) from

speaker to hearer. This is clearly not what goes on in philosophy seminars where

ideas are tossed about to reach a clearer understanding of an intractable problem.

Ideas are routinely bandied about in such a situation and there is little reason to

assume that the speaker know or necessarily even believe the ideas that they

espouse. Does this mean that the knowledge norm is not in play? It does not.

Instead, there is always the possibility that the norm of assertion is overridden by

conversational norms extrinsic to assertion itself. We can see the plausibility of this

situation when we consider that while it may be permissible to flaunt the norm of

assertion, it strikes us as all-things-considered better to qualify our seminar

assertions if we do not believe them. After all, what sounds better simply asserting

‘‘When we utter sentences containing epistemic modals, we express different

contents relative to different interpreters,’’ when you don’t believe it or ‘‘I don’t

necessarily subscribe to the thesis, but what happens if we suppose that we express

different contents relative to different interpreters when we utter sentences

containing epistemic modals’’ when we don’t believe the expressed content of the

proposition?

Let’s move on to the selfless assertions. In the example, which comes from

Jennifer Lackey, Stella asserts something that she does not believe. Since belief is

necessary for knowledge, Stella does not know what she says. Yet, Lackey reasons

that her utterance concerning the origins of man is still an appropriate assertion, and

consequently knowledge is not a necessary condition for epistemically appropriate

assertion. By way of a response, let us first note that like most of Lackey’s

examples, Stella’s assertion takes place in a specific professional context where one

9 Cases 1 and 3 are original to Cappelen. He borrows Case 2 from Lackey (2007) and Case 4 from

Williamson (2000).


123

has duties to follow certain professional norms. One such norm (at least in the case

of Stella) would be to teach her students the curriculum prescribed by her school. To

not do this would be to cheat her students; to violate one of her professional duties.

Hence, it seems that although Stella did not believe what she said, she still had good

reasons to say what she did. That is, her assertion fails to conform with

Williamson’s reading of the C Rule and therefore she is epistemically blameworthy

qua asserter, but her assertion itself is still all-things-considered appropriate and this

is why she is not subject to criticism.

Lackey anticipates such a reply. As she argues, while this may ultimately be a

successful reply to cases where professional responsibilities come into play, that fact

alone cannot account for the propriety of all assertions that lack the asserter’s belief.

Take for instance, her tale of Martin, a racist serving on a jury where an African-

American man is accused of raping a white woman. While there is overwhelming

evidence against the guilt of the defendant, Martin’s racism prevents him from

believing in his innocence. Shortly after the trial was over, Martin is asked by one of

his friends whether the defendant was guilty. In spite of his refusal to admit it to

himself, Martin responds that the accused is innocent (See Lackey 2007, p. 598 for

the full case of the racist juror.). Surely, reasons Lackey, since the exchange took

place out of the courtroom, Martin would be bound by no professional duties and

therefore the objection fails.

Yet, even if Marvin has failed to violate some sort of professional norm, there are

still other means in which his assertion may come out appropriate. Remember that

all-things-considered normativity is composed of various sub-norms that coalesce in

an ultimately proper or improper assertion or one of the sub-norms that is the most

important in the context and will therefore be permissible to assert. So far as I can

tell, few assertions will ever satisfy all of these various sub-norms and it may well

often be the case that an assertion is epistemically inappropriate, but permissible to

assert for some other reasons. As Lackey tells it, Martin realizes that the evidence

does not support the guilt of the suspect and therefore he ‘‘has an obligation to

present the case to others this way’’ (Ibid). Since he reflects on his lack of adequate

evidence for the guilt of the defendant, it seems that Martin will follow some other

kind of normativity when determining what to say to his friend. Perhaps this can be

understood in terms of conversational normativity, where he has a duty to say only

those things which do not contain more information than the conversation requires

(e.g. ‘‘He’s innocent, but I don’t believe it’’). Yet there are other possibilities in

play. Given the conversational setting and twinge of revulsion that he felt over his

own racist sentiments at the moment that he was able to overcome the belief that the

defendant was guilty. To go this latter route would be to question the thought

experiment as Lackey has set it up, but it does not strike me as an entirely

implausible response.

My own intuitions lead me to say that the third and fourth examples cannot be

handled this way since they contain assertions that are not all-things-considered

appropriate. In the case of the third example we’re told that Mia picked her route for

‘‘no particular good reason’’ and furthermore that it would be inappropriate for her

companion to ask her how she knows this or even feel cheated if he finds out about

her epistemic relation to the asserted proposition. These latter claims are not argued

B. Montgomery

123

for, but merely asserted. To my ears at least, the question of ‘‘How do you know that

this is the right way?’’ certainly sounds felicitous. Similarly, I would be perturbed if

I found out that Mia acted as if she knew the correct path when she had a 2/3 chance

of being wrong. I doubt that these would be uncommon reactions. Hence, it is up to

Cappelen to explain why these intuitions are flawed. I hate to respond to Cappelen

using intuitions, but given that this is all that he musters in favor of his proposition,

he owes us an explanation for why we ought to favor his over mine. Furthermore,

there’s also a widespread intuition that from an all-things-considered that the

speaker did assert incorrectly. We can see this from the fact that if he were to find

out the truth, then he would retract the statements, saying something along the line

of ‘‘Oh dear, I was wrong. That’s not snow. It’s movie foam! They’re shooting a

picture outside.’’ Since it is a universally recognized rule of the debate that

assertions only ought to be retracted if there is something wrong with them, four

cannot be used as a counterexample to N-Theories.

3 Breaking rules and leveling accusations

According to Cappelen, there are two ways in which our ordinary linguistic

practices seem to favor the view that we ‘say’ rather than ‘assert’. The first relies on

a disanalogy between games and assertion. If we engaged in an ‘assertion game’

that’s roughly analogous to other cooperative games like chess or a sport, then we

would expect to find not only criticisms of breaking the rules in these cases, but also

praise for having asserted well. Since we lack these judgments, we don’t play the

assertion game. When formalized, the argument seems to go as follows:

(1) If assertions are normative, then they’ll operate in a manner analogous to

games.

(2) If assertions operate in a manner analogous to games, then asserters will

be subject to praise or blame.

(3) But, asserters are never subject to praise or blame.

(4) Therefore, assertions don’t operate in a manner analogous to games.

(5) Therefore assertions aren’t normative.

One might begin by objecting to his third premiss, by noting that we do often

criticize asserters as being uninformative, boring, rude, etc. However, reasons

Cappelen, these criticisms (and possible corresponding praise terms) are not what is

needed to make the N-Theorist’s case. In games we often critique players for

violating the rules of the game in addition to the manner in which the game is

played. Hence, if a pitcher balks, then he has violated a rule of the game and faces

penalty. Similarly, if a quarterback throws a forward pass past the line of

scrimmage, then he has committed a foul. Cappelen reasons that we never call

someone for breaking the rules of assertion in this manner.

But, is this right? Consider how in a game we have both performative critiques

(i.e. being lazy, not paying attention, etc.) and normative critiques. When the latter

occur, we don’t tend to say something along the lines of ‘‘Hey, you broke the rules


123

of the game!’’ Instead, we have technical language to express the rule breaking.

Pitchers never just ‘‘Break the rules’’, they perform balks or throw spitballs. Batters

never ‘‘Violate the rules of baseball’’, they cork their bats and or swing outside of

the batter’s box. But don’t we express criticisms of speakers in much the same way?

That is, in addition to the performative criticisms that we heap on speakers, don’t we

also criticize them for violating the C Rule? For instance, we commonly ask

speakers ‘‘How do you know that?’’ or ‘‘What makes you think that’s true?’’ While

the form of the rebukes may differ, it certainly seems that in the latter cases we are

at least implicitly charging the speakers with violating a rule of assertion, in much

the same way that we might accuse a pitcher of balking. Yet what about Cappelen’s

observation that we never praises speakers for following the C Rule? Fortunately for

us, this only strengthens Williamson’s game analogy as we don’t praise players in a

game for following their rules either. After all, when was the last time that you

heard someone in a non-sarcastic manner praise a pitcher for not throwing a spitball.

But perhaps this is all a bit too quick. According to Cappelen when we train

people in games, we teach them certain critiques and the failure of us ever

exhibiting these critiques (or corresponding praise) is itself evidence that we do not

play that game. But, to borrow an example from Cappelen himself, when we learn a

new game like chess or tennis, we begin with a limited understanding of the rules of

the game and develop a richer and more varied set of appraisals as we progress

through learning the game. But, isn’t this exactly what happens in speech act

theory? To stick with Cappelen’s analogy, we have to consider learning the basics

of speech act theory to be the equivalent of learning the fundamental rules of tennis.

In each case we will learn the basic critiques that most of us are familiar with, but

the recondite criticisms will only be lexically available to those who progressively

study further into the game. Now, according to the traditional speech-act

taxonomies that we’ve inherited from Austin, Searle, Bach and Harnish, etc.

assertion is a subspecies of sayings. This would mean that speech-act theory novices

would be familiar with the criticisms of sayings, but not the criticisms of assertions

(or expressives, declarations, commissives, etc.) in the same way that the tyro might

be familiar with criticisms concerning the basic faults but not know of criticisms

associated with criticisms associated with hindrances. Given this fact, it appears that

our common critiques of speech are the wrong place to look for evidence against

N-theories.

4 Attitude reports: ‘‘saying’’ versus ‘‘asserting’’

Cappelen’s final argument concerns a disanalogy between speech reports and

attributions of game playing. When someone plays a game, reasons Cappelen, it is

natural to report it through speech acts. Hence, if Jim played poker, I could report it

to Mary by saying ‘‘Jim played poker’’ with the noun–verb pairing ‘played poker’

being the default description of the action. I could describe his actions in terms of

‘‘Jim played cards’’, but this is not the default description as it leaves out what most

would deem relevant information. But what about speech reports? We could report

an assertion of Jim’s by saying ‘‘Jim asserted that…’’, but Cappelen thinks that this

B. Montgomery

123

is not the default method of describing the action. Instead, we would typically report

Jim’s speech by saying ‘‘Jim said that…’’, using ‘say’ as the default description.

While the former speech report would sound felicitous amongst a group of

philosophers discussing speech-act theory, Cappelen holds that it would sound

stilted and out of place if used in an ordinary context. Again, Cappelen takes this as

evidence that we don’t play the assertion game.

However, Cappelen neglects the fact that within what we might call expert

communities, there are a number of different names given to a subspecies of an

action. By a subspecies, I mean something along the lines of the relation that

assertion allegedly bears to saying or illocutionary acts bear to locutions. In both of

the cases, the latter are larger categories in which the particular actions are said to be

a part of. In the case of games, there are typically subspecies of the games that

experts easily identify, but of which the uninitiated are ignorant. Sticking with the

example of poker, there are subspecies of poker like five card stud and Texas

holdem. To those of us who aren’t members of the poker community, it would be

perfectly natural to use the phrase ‘played poker’ as our default description of the

activity regardless of what variant he played. Not only would it be true, but it would

also convey the right amount of information for a non-expert. However, if my report

of Jim’s activities was made to a fellow gambler who wanted to know what Jim was

up to in a tournament, then it would be natural for me to report his activity as ‘‘Jim

played Texas holdem’’. The audience determines what would be the proper default

description.

This seems like an accurate description of what goes on in assertion as well.

Although it occasionally creeps into a non-philosopher’s vocabulary, by and large

‘assertion’ is a technical term that has little meaning for those that aren’t familiar

with speech act theory. Assuming that the taxonomy that we’ve inherited from

Austin and Grice is correct, then we have a perfectly natural description of the

phenomenon noted by Cappelen that is consistent with N-Theories. Replacing

‘‘asserting’’ with ‘‘saying’’ in normal speech reports is only to be expected in most

audiences. Since the latter is a subspecies of the former, a report of a declarative

sentence that uses ‘‘saying’’ as its default description is not only a true way of

reporting an assertion, but it is also what would be appropriate for an audience of

non-linguistic philosophers. Hence, the observations that give rise to this phase of

Cappelen’s final argument are consistent with N-Theories of assertion.

But there is another part to Cappelen’s fourth argument. As he figures, if

N-Theories are correct, then when a speaker utters a declarative sentence, then the

default term for reporting it should be assertion. The fact that ‘‘said’’ is the default

term is then used as evidence that we play the ‘‘saying game’’ rather than the

‘‘asserting game’’. What evidence does Cappelen offer in favor of this position?

Again, there’s no argument, but instead he points to a quote from Williamon: ‘‘In

natural language, the default use of declarative’’ (Williamson quoted in Cappelen

2011, p. 29). In order for this to work this means that there must be a bridge between

the default use of a speech act and the default way to report the speech act. But how

plausible is this? The two are clearly sometime correlated, but need not be. The case

of experts seems like a clear instance where the two can be broken. To return to the

poker example, it seems that for the uninitiated, the default description would


123

simply ‘‘played poker’’ while a more seasoned player might use ‘‘played Texas

holdem’’ as the default description. Once we think of examples along these lines, it

is not at all difficult to think of further examples. For instance, we know that

interrogations exist, but the default description is ‘‘questioning’’. Should we be

skeptical of the existence of Tony’s interrogation just because Jane might describe it

as ‘‘Tony was questioned’’? Should we be skeptical of the existence of scrambling

eggs because the default description of what you’re doing in the kitchen is

‘‘cooking’’? Surely we should not. Hence, Cappelen must explain why this argument

works in the case of assertion, but fails with poker, interrogations, scrambling eggs,

and likely a good many other examples.

5 Conclusion

One of the central themes of Cappelen’s critique of N-Theories is that we do not

need to have such complex speech act theories with separate norms governing

individual acts when Gricean sayings can account for everything. I hope that this

paper has gone some way in showing not only that assertions exist, but also why

they are an important aspect of any speech-act theory. While in some ways it would

be simpler for the semanticist if they had a more austere landscape to work with, the

complexities of the phenomenon that we classify as speech acts cannot be handled

under the catchall of ‘‘saying’’. So long as this is the case, then the speech-act

taxonomy that we’ve inherited from Austin onward stands.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Matthew McGrath, Claire Horisk, and an anonymous referee to this

journal for helpful comments.

References

Cappelen, H. (2011). Against Assertion. In J. Brown & H. Cappelen (Eds.), Assertion: New philosophical

essays (pp. 21–48). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Engel, P. (2008). In what sense is knowledge the norm of assertion? In F. Lihoreau (Ed.), Knowledge and

questions. New York: Rodopi.

Grice, P. (1989). Studies in the ways of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hindriks, F. (2007). The status of the knowledge account of assertion. Linguistics and Philosophy, 30,

393–406.

Hintikka, J. (1962). Knowledge and belief: An introduction to the logic of the two notions. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press.

Lackey, J. (2007). Norms of assertion. Nous, 41, 594–626.

Levin, S. C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lewis, D. (1979). Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8, 339–359.

Soames, S. (1982). How presuppositions are inherited: A solution to the projection problem. Linguistic

Inquiry, 13, 483–545.

Stalnaker, R. (1973). Presuppositions. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 2, 447–457.

Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and its limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

B. Montgomery

123

in defense of assertion

Documents