Jessica Brown - Assertion: New Philosophical Essays

This volume originated in a conference on assertion held at the Arch Philosophical Research Centre, St Andrews, Scotland in June 2007. The aim of the conference and of this resulting volume was to bring together new work on assertion by leading epistemologists and philosophers of language. Although the topic of assertion is central to both epistemology and the philosophy of language, work in these two areas is insufficiently integrated. One main aim of the volume is to foster increased interaction between epistemologists and philosophers of language working on assertion.

The primary focus of much work on assertion within the philosophy of language has been to provide an account of assertion understood as a certain type of speech act. A variety of potential accounts has been offered, including the ideas that assertion is individuated by certain norms, or by its effects (for instance, on the common ground of the conversation), or by its commitments, or by its causes, such as the mental state it expresses. A second related issue is how to understand the speech act of assertion if relativism about truth is correct. Some have used relativistic views to defend one or other account of assertion. Others have used the difficulty in providing an account of assertion within a relativistic framework as an argument against relativism.

Within epistemology, assertion is central to debates concerning testimony and the nature of knowledge. Epistemologists have been especially interested in the idea that assertion is governed by a norm that imposes epistemic requirements on appropriate assertion. A recent influential defense of this view is provided by Williamson, who argues that assertion is distinguished from other speech acts by being subject to the following unique constitutive ruleone must: assert p only if one knows that p (Williamson , to summarize the individual chapters in the collection.