John Turri gives an example that he thinks refutes what he takes to be “G. E. Moore's view” that omissive assertions such as “It is raining but I do not believe that it is raining” are “inherently ‘absurd'”. This is that of Ellie, an eliminativist who makes such assertions. Turri thinks that these are perfectly reasonable and not even absurd. Nor does she seem irrational if the sincerity of her assertion requires her to believe its content. A commissive counterpart of (...) Ellie is Di, a dialetheist who asserts or believes that The Russell set includes itself but I believe that it is not the case that the Russell set includes itself. Since any adequate explanation of Moore's paradox must handle commissive assertions and beliefs as well as omissive ones, it must deal with Di as well as engage Ellie. I give such an explanation. I argue that neither Ellie's assertion nor her belief is irrational yet both are absurd. Likewise neither Di's assertion nor her belief is irrational yet in contrast neither is absurd. I conclude that not all Moore-paradoxical assertions or beliefs are irrational and that the syntax of Moore's examples is not sufficient for the absurdity found in them. (shrink)

We shall evaluate two strategies for motivating the view that knowledge is the norm of belief. The first draws on observations concerning belief's aim and the parallels between belief and assertion. The second appeals to observations concerning Moore's Paradox. Neither of these strategies gives us good reason to accept the knowledge account. The considerations offered in support of this account motivate only the weaker account on which truth is the fundamental norm of belief.

Abstract: Moore's sentences of the form "P & ∼I believe that P" and "P & I believe that ∼P" are thought to be paradoxical because they cannot be properly asserted despite being possibly true. Solutions to the paradox usually explain the oddity of such sentences in terms of phenomena as diverse as the pragmatics of speech acts, nature of belief or justification. In this paper I shall argue that despite their seemingly different approaches to the problem, there is a single (...) strategy that underlies all such proposals. Having criticized these suggestions, I shall defend my own solution according to which Moorean sentences are defective not because of some associated logical impropriety but because their assertion violates a certain interpretive constraint, viz., the principle of charity, on an adequate theory of meaning. (shrink)

For Moore, it is a paradox that although I would be absurd in asserting that (it is raining but I don.

In this article, I consider the cases of religious Moorean propositions of the form ‘d, but I don't believe that d’ and ‘d, but I believe that ~d’, where d is a religious dogma, proposition, or part of a creed. I argue that such propositions can be genuinely and rationally asserted and that this fact poses a problem for traditional analysis of religious assertion as an expression of faith and of religious faith as entailing belief. In the article, I explore (...) the possibility of undermining these commonly held assumptions and argue that the assertability of religious Moorean propositions can be justified by an account of faith as an intention to form religious beliefs. In the end, I also consider the consequences of such a stance, especially concerning the debate on the ethics of religious belief and doxastic voluntarism. (shrink)

Self-verifying judgments like _I exist_ seem rational, and self-defeating ones like _It will rain, but I don’t believe it will rain_ seem irrational_._ But one’s evidence might support a self-defeating judgment, and fail to support a self-verifying one. This paper explains how it can be rational to defy one’s evidence if judgment is construed as a mental performance or act, akin to inner assertion. The explanation comes at significant cost, however. Instead of causing or constituting beliefs, judgments turn out to (...) be mere epiphenomena, and self-verification and self-defeat lack the broader philosophical import often claimed for them. (shrink)

Recent work has argued that belief is weak: the level of rational credence required for belief is relatively low. That literature has contrasted belief with assertion, arguing that the latter requires an epistemic state much stronger than (weak) belief---perhaps knowledge or even certainty. We argue that this is wrong: assertion is just as weak as belief. We first present a variety of new arguments for this, and then show that the standard arguments for stronger norms are not convincing. Finally, we (...) sketch an alternative picture on which the fundamental norm of assertion is to say what you believe, but both belief and assertion are weak. To help make sense of this, we propose that both belief and assertion involve navigating a tradeoff between accuracy and informativity, and so it can makes sense to believe/say something you only have weak evidence for, if it is informative enough. (shrink)

Provisional draft, pre-production copy of my book “The Modal Future” (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press).

What is it to believe something might be the case? We develop a puzzle that creates difficulties for standard answers to this question. We go on to propose our own solution, which integrates a Bayesian approach to belief with a dynamic semantics for epistemic modals. After showing how our account solves the puzzle, we explore a surprising consequence: virtually all of our beliefs about what might be the case provide counterexamples to the view that rational belief is closed under logical (...) implication. (shrink)

Moore’s paradox is the fact that assertions or beliefs such asBangkok is the capital of Thailand but I do not believe that Bangkok is the capital of Thailand or Bangkok is the capital of Thailand but I believe that Bangkok is not the capital of Thailand are ‘absurd’ yet possibly true. The current orthodoxy is that an explanation of the absurdity should first start with belief, on the assumption that once the absurdity in belief has been explained then this will (...) translate into an explanation of the absurdity in assertion. This assumption gives explanatory priority to belief over assertion. I show that the translation involved is much trickier than might at first appear. It is simplistic to think that Moorean absurdity in assertion is always a subsidiary product of the absurdity in belief, even when the absurdity is conceived as irrationality. Instead we should aim for explanations of Moorean absurdity in assertion and in belief that are independent even if related, while bearing in mind that some forms of irrationality may be forms of absurdity even if not conversely. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the nature and scope of Moore’s paradox, articulates the desiderata of a successful solution and claims that psychological expressivism best meets these desiderata. After a brief discussion of prominent responses to Moore’s paradox, the paper offers a solution based on a theory of expressive acts: a Moorean utterance is absurd because the speaker expresses mental states with conflicting contents in commissive versions of the paradox and conflicting states of mind in omissive versions. The paper presents a theory (...) of expressivism for self-ascriptions of mental states. In addition, it introduces the idea of expressive denegation—the speaker’s expressing the absence of a mental state—as an analysis of negative self-ascriptions of mental states. Some of the consequences of expressivism for avowals are explored. (shrink)

It is raining but you don’t believe that it is raining. Imagine silently accepting this claim. Then you believe both that it is raining and that you don’t believe that it is raining. This would be an ‘absurd’ thing to believe,yet what you believe might be true. Itmight be raining, while at the same time, you are completely ignorant of the state of the weather. But how can it be absurd of you to believe something about yourself that might be (...) true of you? This is Moore’s paradox as it occurs in thought. Solving the paradox consists in explaining why such beliefs are absurd. I give a survey of some of the main explanations. I largely deal with explanations of the absurdity of ‘omissive’ beliefs with contents of the form p & I don’t believe that p and of ‘commissive beliefs’ with contents of the form p & I believe that not-p as well as beliefs with contents of the form p & I don’t know that p. (shrink)

John N. Williams (1994) and Matthew Weiner (2005) invoke predictions in order to undermine the normative relevance of knowledge for assertions; in particular, Weiner argues, predictions are important counterexamples to the Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA). I argue here that they are not true counterexamples at all, a point that can be agreed upon even by those who reject KAA.

On the basis of arguments showing that none of the most influential analyses of Moore's paradox yields a successful resolution of the problem, a new analysis of it is offered. It is argued that, in attempting to render verdicts of either inconsistency or self-contradiction or self-refutation, those analyses have all failed to satisfactorily explain why a Moore-paradoxical proposition is such that it cannot be rationally believed. According to the proposed solution put forward here, a Moore-paradoxical proposition is one for which (...) the believer can have no non-overridden evidence. The arguments for this claim make use of some of Peter Klein's views on epistemic defeasibility. It is further suggested that this proposal may have important meta-epistemological implications. (shrink)

An analysis of Moore's paradox is given in doxastic logic. Logics arising from formalizations of various introspective principles are compared; one logic, K5c, emerges as privileged in the sense that it is the weakest to avoid Moorean belief. Moreover it has other attractive properties, one of which is that it can be justified solely in terms of avoiding false belief. Introspection is therefore revealed as less relevant to the Moorean problem than first appears.

It is raining but you don’t believe that it is raining. Imagine accepting this claim. Then you are committed to saying ‘It is raining but I don’t believe that it is raining’. This would be an ‘absurd’ thing to claim or assert, yet what you say might be true. It might be raining, while at the same time, you are completely ignorant of the state of the weather. But how can it be absurd of you to assert something about yourself (...) that might be true of you? This is Moore’s paradox as it occurs in speech. What is the source of the absurdity? And why does it strike us that a contradiction is somehow at work when there is no contradiction in the content of what is asserted? In Section 2, I describe Moore’s formulation of the paradox and evaluate his own solutions. In Section 3, I discuss Wittgenstein’s inf luence in solving the paradox. In Section 4, I discuss Shoemaker’s priority thesis that once the absurdity in belief has been explained, then this will translate into an explanation of the absurdity in assertion. In Section 5, I discuss work on omissive and commissive Moore-paradoxical assertions, i.e. those of the forms p & I don’t believe that p and p & I believe that not-p. In Section 6, I discuss work on assertions of the form p & I don’t know that p. (shrink)

Is there a Moore ’s paradox in desire? I give a normative explanation of the epistemic irrationality, and hence absurdity, of Moorean belief that builds on Green and Williams’ normative account of absurdity. This explains why Moorean beliefs are normally irrational and thus absurd, while some Moorean beliefs are absurd without being irrational. Then I defend constructing a Moorean desire as the syntactic counterpart of a Moorean belief and distinguish it from a ‘Frankfurt’ conjunction of desires. Next I discuss putative (...) examples of rational and irrational desires, suggesting that there are norms of rational desire. Then I examine David Wall’s groundbreaking argument that Moorean desires are always unreasonable. Next I show against this that there are rational as well as irrational Moorean desires. Those that are irrational are also absurd, although there seem to be absurd desires that are not irrational. I conclude that certain norms of rational desire should be rejected. (shrink)

Propositions such as are paradoxical, in that even though they can be true, they cannot be truly asserted or believed. This is Moore’s paradox. Sydney Shoemaker has recently ar- gued that the paradox arises from a constitutive relation that holds between first- and second-order beliefs. This paper explores this approach to the paradox. Although Shoemaker’s own account of the paradox is rejected, a different account along similar lines is endorsed. At the core of the endorsed account is the claim that (...) conscious beliefs are always partly about themselves; it will be shown to follow from this that conscious beliefs in Moorean propositions are self-contradictory. (shrink)

I supply an argument for Evans's principle that whatever justifies me in believing that p also justifies me in believing that I believe that p. I show how this principle helps explain how I come to know my own beliefs in a way that normally makes me the best authority on them. Then I show how the principle helps to solve Moore's paradoxes.

In this article I argue that two received accounts of belief and assertion cannot both be correct, because they entail mutually contradictory claims about Moore's Paradox. The two accounts in question are, first, the Action Theory of Belief, the functionalist view that belief must be manifested in dispositions to act, and second, the Belief Account of Assertion, the Gricean view that an asserter must present himself as believing what he asserts. It is generally accepted also that Moorean assertions are absurd, (...) and that BAA explains why they are. I shall argue that ATB implies that some Moorean assertions are, in some fairly ordinary contexts, well justified. Thus BAA and ATB are mutually inconsistent. In the concluding section I explore three possible ways of responding to the dilemma, and what implications they have for the nature of the constitutive relationships linking belief, assent and behavioural dispositions. (shrink)

In a recent article, David Christensen casts aspersions on a restricted version of van Fraassen's Reflection principle, which he dubs ‘Self-Respect’(sr). Rejecting two possible arguments for sr, he concludes that the principle does not constitute a requirement of rationality. In this paper we argue that not only has Christensen failed to make a case against the aforementioned arguments, but that considerations pertaining to Moore's paradox indicate that sr, or at the very least a mild weakening thereof, is indeed a plausible (...) normative principle. (shrink)

It is argued, on the basis of new counterexamples, that neither knowledge nor epistemic justification (or epistemic rationality ) can reasonably be thought to be closed under logical implication. The argument includes an attempt to reconcile the fundamental intuitions of the opposing parties in the debate.

G. E. Moore famously observed that to assert ‘I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I do not believe that I did’ would be ‘absurd’. Moore calls it a ‘paradox’ that this absurdity persists despite the fact that what I say about myself might be true. Krista Lawlor and John Perry have proposed an explanation of the absurdity that confines itself to semantic notions while eschewing pragmatic ones. We argue that this explanation faces four objections. We give a better (...) explanation of the absurdity both in assertion and in belief that avoids our four objections. (shrink)

Moore’s paradox in belief is the fact that beliefs of the form ‘ p and I do not believe that p ’ are ‘absurd’ yet possibly true. Writers on the paradox have nearly all taken the absurdity to be a form of irrationality. These include those who give what Timothy Chan calls the ‘pragmatic solution’ to the paradox. This solution turns on the fact that having the Moorean belief falsifies its content. Chan, who also takes the absurdity to be a (...) form of irrationality, objects to this solution by arguing that it is circular and thus incomplete. This is because it must explain why Moorean beliefs are irrational yet, according to Chan, their grammatical third-person transpositions are not, even though the same proposition is believed. But the solution can only explain this asymmetry by relying on a formulation of the ground of the irrationality of Moorean beliefs that presupposes precisely such asymmetry. I reply that it is neither necessary nor sufficient for the irrationality that the contents of Moorean beliefs be restricted to the grammatical first-person. What has to be explained is rather that such grammatical non-first-person transpositions sometimes, but not always, result in the disappearance of irrationality. Describing this phenomenon requires the grammatical first-person/non-first person distinction. The pragmatic solution explains the phenomenon once it is formulated in de se terms. But the grammatical first-person/non-first-person distinction is independent of, and a fortiori, different from, the de se /non- de se distinction presupposed by pragmatic solution, although both involve the first person broadly construed. Therefore the pragmatic solution is not circular. Building on the work of Green and Williams I also distinguish between the irrationality of Moorean beliefs and their absurdity. I argue that while all irrational Moorean beliefs are absurd, some Moorean beliefs are absurd but not irrational. I explain this absurdity in a way that is not circular either. (shrink)

I argue that Moore's propositions, for example, 'I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don't believe that I did' cannot be rationally believed. Their assertors either cannot be rationally believed or cannot be believed to be rational. This analysis is extended to Moorean propositions such as God knows that I am an atheist and I believe that this proposition is false. I then defend the following definition of assertion: anyone asserts that p iff that person expresses a belief (...) that p with the intention of causing relevant epistemic change in the cognition of an actual or potential audience. (shrink)

One version of Moore’s Paradox is the challenge to account for the absurdity of beliefs purportedly expressed by someone who asserts sentences of the form ‘p & I do not believe that p’. The absurdity of these beliefs is philosophically puzzling, given that Moorean sentences are contingent and often true; and express contents that are unproblematic when presented in the third-person. In this paper I critically examine the most popular proposed solution to these two puzzles, according to which Moorean beliefs (...) are absurd because Moorean sentences are instances of pragmatic paradox; that is to say, the propositions they express are necessarily false-when-believed. My conclusion is that while a Moorean belief is a pragmatic paradox, it is not just another pragmatic paradox, because this diagnosis does not explain all the puzzling features of Moorean beliefs. In particularly, while this analysis is plausible in relation to the puzzle posed by characteristic of Moorean sentences, I argue that it fails to account for. I do so in the course of an attempt to formulate the definition of a pragmatic paradox in more precise formal terms, in order to see whether the definition is satisfied by Moorean sentences, but not by their third-person transpositions. For only an account which can do so could address adequately. After rejecting a number of attempted formalizations, I arrive at a definition which delivers the right results. The problem with this definition, however, is that it has to be couched in first-person terms, making an essential use of ‘I’. Thus the problem of accounting for first-/third-person asymmetry recurs at a higher order, which shows that the Pragmatic Paradox Resolution fails to identify the source of such asymmetry highlighted by Moore’s Paradox. (shrink)

I argue that ‘Moore’s paradox for God’. I do not believe this proposition shows that nobody can be both omniscient and rational in all her beliefs. I then anticipate and rebut three objections to my argument.

ABSTRACT Timothy Williamson offers the ordinary practice, the lottery and the Moorean argument for the ‘knowledge account’ that assertion is the only speech-act that is governed by the single rule that one must know its content. I show that these fail to support it and that the emptiness of the knowledge account renders mysterious why breaking the knowledge rule should be a source of criticism. I argue that focussing exclusively on the sincerity of the speech-act of letting one know engenders (...) a category mistake about the nature of constraints on assertion. After giving an analysis of assertion I propose that the norm of a type of assertion is the epistemic state one needs for one’s speech-act to succeed in being an assertion of that type and that the epistemic state in question is determined by the point of the type of assertion. One is practically irrational in violating the norm. (shrink)

O objetivo deste trabalho é mostrar que, em relação ao uso de termos psicológicos, Wittgenstein assume uma forma muito particular de expressivismo. Alguns autores procuram mostrar que Wittgenstein é um expressivista no sentido tradicional, outros procuram defender que o filósofo não é um expressivista em nenhum sentido. Para Do Carmo, ambos os modos de conceber a posição wittgensteiniana estão profundamente equivocados e, neste trabalho, ele tenta defender não apenas que Wittgenstein assume certos pressupostos do expressivismo, mas, também que sua posição (...) é potencialmente capaz de superar algumas dificuldades, como a falácia descritivista, por exemplo. Sua estratégia será considerar, em primeiro lugar, o modo como o filósofo procura mostrar a absurdidade das sentenças Moore-paradoxais tomando como pano de fundo o trabalho de Eduardo Ferreira das Neves Filho e, em um segundo momento, mostrar que o tratamento wittgensteiniano dos termos psicológicos consiste justamente na dissolução da dicotomia “descrição-expressão”. Na terceira seção deste artigo, Neves Filho procura responder a algumas das análises e críticas realizadas por Do Carmo nas duas seções anteriores, destacando algumas implicações da assunção de um forte expressivismo para uma solução ao Paradoxo de Moore. (shrink)

Neste artigo, pretendemos sustentar que o Paradoxo de Moore é um problema de natureza epistemológica, rejeitando, assim, que a análise implique questões de natureza ética, particularmente se o argumento é mostrar que o PM, na solução assercionista de J. Williams, descumpre uma condição para o sucesso de atos de fala: a condição da sinceridade. Queremos apontar que essa condição é secundária no exame do problema. Por fim, apresentaremos uma dissolução do PM na perspectiva de R. Moran como um caso de (...) akrasia epistêmica, um choque de autoridades de primeira e terceira pessoas, que tem reflexos na análise assercionista do PM, bem como à ação humana. In this article, we intend to maintain that Moore’s Paradox has an epistemological nature, rejecting, ! a priori questions about ethics, particularly if the argument shows that the PM, in the assercionist solution offered by J. Williams, does not comply a presumed condition to the success of speech acts: the sincerity condition. We maintain that this condition is secondary in the " # !$ % a case of epistemic akrasia "" $ analysis of PM, as well to the human action. (shrink)

It is argued, on the basis of new counterexamples, that neither knowledge nor epistemic justification (or “epistemic rationality”) can reasonably be thought to be closed under logical implication. The argument includes an attempt to reconcile the fundamental intuitions of the opposing parties in the debate.