P, but you don’t know that P

Christopher Willard-Kyle

doi:10.1007/s11229-021-03438-4

P, but you don’t know that P

Christopher Willard-Kyle

Philosophy

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Unlike first-person Moorean sentences, it’s not always awkward to assert, “p, but you don’t know that p.” This can seem puzzling: after all, one can never get one’s audience to know the asserted content by speaking thus. Nevertheless, such assertions can be conversationally useful, for instance, by helping speaker and addressee agree on where to disagree. I will argue that such assertions also make trouble for the growing family of views about the norm of assertion that what licenses proper assertion is not the initiating epistemic position of the speaker but the (potential) resulting epistemic position of the audience.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	14667-14690
Number of pages	24
Journal	Synthese
Volume	199
Issue number	5-6
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03438-4
State	Published - Dec 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s).

Funding

I’m grateful to D Black, Laura Callahan, Liz Camp, Sam Carter, Tez Clark, Carolina Flores, Danny Forman, Chris Frugé, Michael Glanzberg, Sandy Goldberg, Verónica Gómez Sánchez, Matt Jope, Jennifer Lackey, Matt McGrath, Ezra Rubenstein, Ernie Sosa, Jeff Tolly, Caroline von Klemperer, Dennis Whitcomb, Elise Woodard, and several anonymous referees for excellent discussion on assertion. Funding for the completion of this research was provided by a postdoctoral fellowship funded, in part, by Therme Group.

Funders	Funder number
Therme Group

Keywords

Assertion
Moorean sentences
Testimony

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Philosophy
General Social Sciences

Access to Document

10.1007/s11229-021-03438-4

Cite this

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title = "P, but you don{\textquoteright}t know that P",

abstract = "Unlike first-person Moorean sentences, it{\textquoteright}s not always awkward to assert, “p, but you don{\textquoteright}t know that p.” This can seem puzzling: after all, one can never get one{\textquoteright}s audience to know the asserted content by speaking thus. Nevertheless, such assertions can be conversationally useful, for instance, by helping speaker and addressee agree on where to disagree. I will argue that such assertions also make trouble for the growing family of views about the norm of assertion that what licenses proper assertion is not the initiating epistemic position of the speaker but the (potential) resulting epistemic position of the audience.",

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ER -

P, but you don’t know that P

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Access to Document

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