December 12, 2006

Some Really Awkward Data for the Knowledge Account of Assertion

In response to an obnoxious dude mocking his use of qualifiers, Spencer Ackerman says:

Sorry, you'd rather I be less transparent about what I assert and what I know? Take the analysis or leave it.

[Aside: When you accidentally paste that into the "I feel lucky" Googlebar in Firefox, you get this.]

This sounds like Ackerman is saying that what he asserts is not what he knows. Now it makes sense to read "what I assert" as "what I merely assert," but even that won't help out the view that asserting is representing yourself as knowing, for Ackerman seems to be explicitly acknowledging that he's asserting things that he doesn't know. I honestly can't think of a thing that the knowledge account can do to make sense of this, except to say that he's asserting a paradox and that we have to do some serious interpretation to figure that out. Or possibly to say that "assert" in ordinary parlance doesn't name the technical philosophical notion of assertion, as when we say "I believe that p" many philosophers take it that we are not actually expressing full-fledged belief.

Posted by Matt Weiner at December 12, 2006 08:27 AM
Comments

I'm pretty sure the possibility mentioned in your last sentence is the right way to interpret this.

Posted by: teofilo at December 12, 2006 12:39 PM

But why? There are principled Gricean reasons to think that "I believe that p" doesn't actually express a full-fledged belief that p, namely that if you really believed that p you'd just say "p." I don't see any similar reason to say that what Spack says he asserts isn't really what he asserts. [Unless the idea is that 'assertion' is just a technical philosophical term, but then the knowledge account of assertion is boring.]

Posted by: Matt Weiner at December 12, 2006 05:04 PM

I mean the technical term bit. I kind of doubt Spencer was intending "assert" in its technical philosophical sense.

Posted by: teofilo at December 12, 2006 06:19 PM

Ah, but what is the technical philosophical sense? I'm not sure that everyone is willing to admit that 'assert' is a technical term; and if it is, I think it's usually taken to be a broad one, so that anything The Folk describe as assertion counts and more besides (e.g., what the Folk would describe as 'saying' or 'telling'). Or not, sometimes people really do seem to use 'assert' as a technical term that doesn't track ordinary use closely. For instance, Williamson I think (maybe following Unger?) draws a distinction between asserting and saying, though I find the distinction obscure.

Posted by: Matt Weiner at December 12, 2006 08:19 PM

There can't be a problem for the knowledge account here. What is Ackerman saying he asserted? He's responding to obnoxious guy mocking his use of qualifiers. So Ackerman is talking about what is asserted by the use of a qualified sentence, e.g. 'As best as I can tell, there is an Iraqi identity'. There are two possibilities for what Ackerman thinks he asserted when he used this sentence:
-That as best as he can tell, there is an Iraqi identity.
-That there is an Iraqi identity.
If he thinks he asserted the latter, he's just wrong. The qualifier prevented that.
If he's talking about having asserted the former, then he's wrong to imply he doesn't know it. Sure he knows that as best as he can tell, there's an Iraqi identity.
So there are good independent reasons to think that Ackerman's original blog post did not involve a case of assertion without knowledge, even if his response to obnoxious guy suggests that it did. It seems like a harmless bit of sloppy talk to me.

Posted by: Leo Iacono at December 12, 2006 11:47 PM

Hey, I'm no philosopher. I was assuming "assertion" was a technical term in philosophy, but if it isn't, I don't see what the problem is. Leo's argument sounds good to me.

Posted by: teofilo at December 12, 2006 11:52 PM

Leo, I think it's pretty clear that Ackerman is disclaiming knowledge of pretty much the whole analysis, including the sentences without qualifiers such as "Iraq is worse," "As a result, the competing sectarian claimant isn't merely a security threat. It's an existential, metaphyisical challenge to the identity you claim," etc. Is there any reason to think he didn't assert that Iraq is worse and that the threat is existential and metaphysical, other than his disclaimer of knowledge?

I even doubt that it's correct to say that he didn't assert there is an Iraqi identity. Or at least, I think you have to go stipulative about assertion to rule this out as an assertion. Why not just say that he made a tentative assertion? If I say "In my opinion, the situation in Iraq will only get worse," it doesn't seem odd to say that I asserted that the situation in Iraq will only get worse; unless you're already committed to saying that assertion requires a claim to knowledge.

Finally, the knowledge account predicts that the original blockquoted sentence should sound almost nonsensical, but it doesn't. I think this is a problem for the knowledge account regardless of the details of the specific assertions.

Posted by: Matt Weiner at December 13, 2006 08:30 AM

Matt,

I guess I disagree with you about how to interpret Ackerman's response. It seems to me that since he is responding to somebody mocking his use of qualifiers, it makes sense that he is talking only about those sentences that involve qualifiers.

With respect to your last point, that regardless of the details of the assertions being discussed, what Ackerman said should sound almost nonsensical if the knowledge account is correct: as you know the knowledge account doesn't say that assertion requires knowledge; it says that proper assertion requires knowledge. But Ackerman is not saying that his assertions were proper (I'm sure he believes that they were, but that's not what he's saying), just that it is preferable to make it clear when you assert what you don't know (actually Ackerman is asking the guy whether he would prefer that Ackerman not make it clear when he doesn't know what he's asserting, but let's take that as a rhetorical way of saying that it is preferable to make it clear when you assert what you don't know). This fact about what is preferable is not obviously inconsistent with the knowledge account; it might be preferable to make it clear when you assert what you don't know (rather than disguising the fact) even if asserting what you don't know is always improper. So I don't see why the knowledge account predicts that Ackerman's response would seem nonsensical, or even almost nonsensical.

Posted by: Leo Iacono at December 13, 2006 10:16 AM