Why, when asking oneself whether to believe that p, must one immediately recognize that this question is settled by, and only by, answering the question whether p is true? Truth is not an optional end for first-personal doxastic deliberation, providing an instrumental or extrinsic reason that an agent may take or leave at will. Otherwise there would be an inferential step between discovering the truth with respect to p and determining whether to believe that p, involving a bridge premise that (...) it is good to believe the truth with respect to p. But there is no such gap between the two questions within the first-personal deliberative perspective; the question whether to believe that p seems to collapse into the question whether p is true. (shrink)

Continues the theme of the preceding chapters, examining further the possibility of irrational thought and action, judged against a background that stipulates large‐scale rationality as a necessary condition for both interpretability and possession of a mind. Concentrates on the phenomenon of self‐deception, which the author holds to include ‘weakness of the warrant’, a phenomenon that violates what Hempel and Carnap have called ‘the requirement of total evidence for inductive reasoning’. The main tool to remove the paradox of self‐deception, according to (...) the author, is the recognition of the idea that there can be boundaries between parts of the mind. Such boundaries, however, are not discovered by introspection, but are conceptual aids to the coherent description of genuine irrationalities. (shrink)

This note responds to criticism put forth by Don Fallis of an account of lying in terms of the Stalnakerian view of assertion. According to this account, to lie is to say something one believes to be false and thereby propose that it become common ground. Fallis objects by presenting an example to show that one can lie even though one does not propose to make what one says common ground. It is argued here that this objection does not present (...) a problem for the view of lying as Stalnakerian assertion. Responding to the objection brings out important features of this view of discourse and of assertion. (shrink)

It is commonplace to claim that it is good to believe the truth. In this paper, I reject that claim and argue that the considerations which might seem to support it in fact support a quite distinct though superficially similar claim, namely, that it is bad to believe the false. This claim is typically either ignored completely or lumped together with the previous claim, perhaps on the assumption that the two are equivalent, or at least that they stand or fall (...) together. Such assumptions, I argue, are mistaken. While it is not always good to be right, it is always bad to be wrong. This is an interesting and overlooked asymmetry, which calls for further investigation. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the speech act of assertion is fundamentally characterized by the rule that one should assert only what one knows to be the case. Accounts based on other rules such as that one should assert only what is true or what one reasonably believes are argued to give false predictions in various cases, such as assertions about lotteries. The connection between knowledge and assertion is shown not to be merely a matter of Grice's conversational implicature. The account (...) is applied to the connection between assertion and proof in mathematics. The point of having such a speech act is explored through the analogy between knowledge and action. (shrink)

Many recent definitions of lying are based on the notion of what is said. This paper argues that says-based definitions of lying cannot account for lies involving non-literal speech, such as metaphor, hyperbole, loose use or irony. It proposes that lies should instead be defined in terms of assertion, where what is asserted need not coincide with what is said. And it points to possible implications this outcome might have for the ethics of lying.

Safety is a notion familiar to epistemologists principally because of the way in which it has been used in the attempt to cast light on the nature of knowledge. In particular, some have argued that an important constraint on knowledge is that one knows p only if one believes p safely. In this paper, I use safety for a different purpose: to cast light on the nature of assertion. I introduce what I call the safety account of assertion, according to (...) which one asserts p properly only if one asserts p safely. The central idea is that an assertion’s propriety depends on whether one could easily have asserted falsely in a similar case. I argue that the safety account is well motivated, since it neatly explains our intuitions about a wide range of assertions of different kinds. Of particular interest is the fact that the account explains our intuitions about several kinds of assertions which appear to raise problems for well-known rival accounts. (shrink)

An account of the norms of assertion is proposed which is supported by the same considerations that motivate the familiar knowledge account of those norms, but does not have a problematic consequence of the latter. This alternative account is defended against others to be found in the literature, and some larger epistemological issues it raises are considered briefly.