P, but you don’t know that P

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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 languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)14667-14690
Number of pages24
JournalSynthese
Volume199
Issue number5-6
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2021

Bibliographical note

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

Keywords

  • Assertion
  • Moorean sentences
  • Testimony

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Philosophy
  • General Social Sciences

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