Can Artificial Entities Assert?

There is an existing debate regarding the view that technological instruments, devices, or machines can assert or testify. A standard view in epistemology is that only humans can testify. However, the notion of quasi-testimony acknowledges that technological devices can assert or testify under some conditions, without denying that humans and machines are not the same. Indeed, there are four relevant differences between humans and instruments. First, unlike humans, machine assertion is not imaginative or playful. Second, machine assertion is prescripted and context restricted. As such, computers currently cannot easily switch contexts or make meaningful relevant assertions in contexts for which they were not programmed. Third, while both humans and computers make errors, they do so in different ways. Computers are very sensitive to small errors in input, which may cause them to make big errors in output. Moreover, automatic error control is based on finding irregularities in data without trying to establish whether they make sense. Fourth, testimony is produced by a human with moral worth, while quasi-testimony is not. Ultimately, the notion of quasi-testimony can serve as a bridge between different philosophical fields that deal with instruments and testimony as sources of knowledge, allowing them to converse and agree on a shared description of reality, while maintaining their distinct conceptions and ontological commitments about knowledge, humans, and nonhumans.

Assertion: The Constitutive Norms View

Two important philosophical questions about assertion concern its nature and normativity. This article defends the optimism about the constitutive norm account of assertion and sets out a constitutivity thesis that is much more modest than that proposed by Timothy Williamson. It starts by looking at the extant objections to Williamson’s Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA) and argues that they fail to hit their target in virtue of imposing implausible conditions on engaging in norm-constituted activities. Second, it makes a similar proposal and shows how it does better than the competition. It suggests that Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA) is not constitutive of the speech act of assertion in the same way in which rules of games are constitutive, and thus KAA comes out as too strong. The final section embarks on a rescue mission on behalf of KAA; it puts forth a weaker, functionalist constitutivity thesis. On this view, KNA is etiologically constitutively associated with the speech act of assertion, in virtue of its function of generating knowledge in hearers.

Threats, Warnings, and Assertions

This article explores warnings and threats through the lens of popular illocutionary taxonomies. It argues that if we tap into moral philosophy to help carve out some important distinctions between types of warnings and threats, we find that these more specific concepts do constitute illlocutions. It shows that the principles used by John Searle, Kent Bach, and John Harnish to differentiate the categories of illocutions can be employed to analyze warnings and threats. When unconditional, warnings generally have what Searle calls an assertive illocutionary point, and threats a commissive (commitment-making) illocutionary point. However, the best way to explain conditional threats or warnings is through a combination of illocutions. The article concludes by describing a specific type of threat: noncommittal threats. It argues that noncommittal threats, unlike all other threats, involve assertions.

Assertion and the Future

It is disputed what norm, if any, governs assertion. We address this question by looking at assertions of future contingents: statements about the future that are neither metaphysically necessary nor metaphysically impossible. Many philosophers think that future contingents are not truth apt, which together with a Truth Norm or a Knowledge Norm of assertion implies that assertions of these future contingents are systematically infelicitous.In this article, we argue that our practice of asserting future contingents is incompatible with the view that they are not truth apt. We consider a range of norms of assertion and argue that the best explanation of the data is provided by the view that assertion is governed by the Knowledge Norm.

Assertoric Quality

The practice of assertion is said to be governed by an epistemic norm, with one of the leading candidates being the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA). In this paper, I focus on the sufficiency condition of this norm, according to which one is properly positioned to assert that p if one knows that p. I show that this condition is false, and that the arguments to this end reveal something very important about the nature of epistemically proper assertion: the assertoric quality of the epistemic support, such as whether the belief in question has firsthand or secondhand grounding, is just as important as the quantity of epistemic support.

Formal Models of Assertion

This article provides an overview of different formal models that could be of interest to epistemologists interested in assertion. It also says something about where they fit into the general picture of assertion as a phenomenon involving both an asserter and an assertee. The author’s perspective is that of the philosopher rather than that of the logician. A semiformal level of description is employed, partly because some models are highly complex and merely introducing the basic formal machinery, let alone some elementary results or proofs, would consume too much space. The term “formal” is used in a broad sense to include theories that have mathematical or logical elements, even if they are not completely formal. The discussions cover Bayesian models of assertion and logical models.

The Belief View of Assertion

This article discusses the belief view of assertion, which considers assertion to be basically the expression of a belief. Let “S” stand for the asserter and “p” be a placeholder for a declarative sentence providing the content of the assertion. Then the belief view, in its purest form, takes “S asserts that p” to mean that S expresses the belief that p. The article proceeds as follows. It first introduces three general worries threatening variants of the belief view. Afterwards, it deals with Green’s disjunctive analysis, which utilizes a factive concept of belief expression for delineating sincere assertions and then provides conditions for insincere assertions. The remaining sections turn to Bach and Harnish’s, Davis’s, and Kemmerling’s variants of the belief view. They are connected by applying a nonfactive concept of belief expression to both sincere and insincere assertions. It is shown that these accounts face a common problem. The involved notion of indicating a belief has to be weak enough to allow for obviously insincere assertions, that is, cases in which it is evident to all eyes that the utterer does not believe what she asserts. But then it appears to be too weak to exclude utterances by which an assertion is simulated but not performed.

Assertion among the Speech Acts

This article discusses how assertion is an illocutionary act. Once assertion is taken to be an illocutionary act, the question arises of how it relates to other illocutionary acts. This is the main issue tackled in this article, and it is two-fold. It examines how assertion relates to illocutionary acts that are in some way similar to it, at least as to their involving the utterance of plain declarative sentences; and how assertion and its cognates should best be collocated within the whole gamut of illocutionary acts. The former exploration will rely upon a largely intuitive grasp of the “family” of assertive illocutionary acts; the latter will involve both a fuller characterization of assertion and reconsideration of illocutionary act classification. The article then turns to the question of the role or rank of assertion among illocutionary acts: whether it is “just” one among them, or there are reasons for granting it some primacy or some special function.

Ethical Dimensions of Assertion

This article considers the ethical dimensions of acts of assertion. Acts of assertion often have moral features, such as being wrong. In this regard, they are like many other familiar acts such as invasions of privacy and inflictions of bodily harm, which are also often wrong. But might assertion have an even more intimate link to moral reality than these other actions? Might it be that how things are ethically explains how it is that we could perform illocutionary acts such as asserting? A version of what the author calls the normative theory of speech answers in the affirmative. This view maintains that the performance of illocutionary acts such as asserting not only often have moral properties, such as being morally wrong, but also that there are cases in which moral facts explain (in part) how it is that agents can perform these acts. The article presents the rudiments of the normative theory of speech, paying attention to why it maintains that moral facts are among the features that explain how it is that we can assert. Along the way, the author points to some interesting metaethical implications of the position.

Hedged Assertion

Surprisingly little has been written about hedged assertion. Linguists often focus on semantic or syntactic theorizing about, for example, grammatical evidentials or epistemic modals, but they pay far less attention to what hedging does at the level of action. By contrast, philosophers have focused extensively on normative issues regarding what epistemic position is required for proper assertion, yet they have almost exclusively considered unqualified declaratives. This article considers the linguistic and normative issues side by side. It aims to bring some order and clarity to thinking about hedging, so as to illuminate aspects of interest to both linguists and philosophers. In particular, it considers three broad questions. (1) The structural question: when one hedges, what is the speaker’s commitment weakened from? (2) The functional question: what is the best way to understand how a hedge weakens? And (3) the taxonomic question: are hedged assertions genuine assertions, another speech act, or what?