A Unified Treatment of Moore's Paradox by John N. Williams;

Author:John N. Williams; [Williams, John N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198879558
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2023-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

9.10 The Emptiness of the Knowledge Account: What’s Wrong with Breaking the Rule?

Williamson says more about what the norm of assertion isn’t than what it is. He tells us that constitutive rules are not necessary conditions for performing the constituted act (2000, 240). He says nothing about what the necessary and sufficient conditions of the speech-act of assertion might be. He gives few examples of assertion, although he does observe that assertions are not verbal conjectures (2000, 244–5).

Those who follow Williamson in discussing norms of assertion likewise give no account of the nature of assertion.8 The single clue he gives us is his pronouncement that assertion is the ‘exterior analogue of judgement’ (2000, 238). This might lead us to think that if I judge that it is raining, then uttering to you the words ‘It is raining’ is the exterior analogue of my judgement and so is an assertion. This cannot be correct however, since I might utter these words in order to test a microphone or as lines in a play, in which latter case I at most merely depict the speech-act of assertion. Nor is uttering necessary, as shown by the case of nodding my head. So in the ordinary sense of the word, asserting isn’t saying (contrary to Herman Cappelen 2011). Nonetheless it will be convenient to retain the application of the term ‘speech-act’ to assertions, bearing in mind that the act may be non-verbal.

More importantly, if one’s assertion is the exterior analogue of one’s judgement, then since there is no such thing as an insincere judgement, assertions are necessarily sincere. This result coheres with Williamson’s preoccupation with the point of assertion as informing. He seems to think of making an assertion as restricted to letting one know. This is why he claims that ‘We need assertion to transmit knowledge’ (2000, 267). For example, if you ask me the time, I may let you know that it is 2 p.m. by asserting to you ‘It is 2 p.m.’ Of course informing, as opposed to misinforming, is necessarily sincere.

But surely we do make insincere assertions. As we have already seen, lies are genuine speech-acts of assertion. Now if there is only one rule of assertion, namely that one must know its content, then any type of assertion must be governed by that rule. In particular, since lying is asserting, then in telling you a lie I must know that its content is true. This makes any lie a defective assertion quite independently of any moral criticism, for when I lie to you, I believe that what I have told you is false. So unless I am irrational in having overtly contradictory beliefs, I do not believe, nor therefore know, that the content of my assertion is true. Indeed I may easily know that I do not know that it is true.

Moreover, mastering the speech-act of lying does not require implicitly grasping the rule that one knows its content. Indeed if one took this as the rule, then it is difficult to see how one could ever learn to lie.

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