Naivety and assurance.
A familiar criticism of so-called ‘assurance’ theorists is that they fail to demonstrate how testimony delivers a specifically epistemic reason. Whilst their accounts of the speech act of telling may do justice in various respects to our self-understanding as interlocutors – as agents who engage in...
| Publicado en: | Synthese Vol. 206; no. 1; pp. 1 - 24 |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Artículo |
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Springer Nature
Jul2025
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=186608725&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 186608725 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00397857 4LI jtl: Synthese issn: 00397857 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Jul2025 vid: 206 iid: 1 pid: 237 pub: Springer Nature artinfo: ui: 186608725 10.1007/s11229-025-05143-y ppf: 1 ppct: 23 formats: fmt: @attributes: type: T tig: atl: Naivety and assurance. aug: au: Englander, Alex affil: https://ror.org/041nas322 Institute for Philosophy, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany sug: keyword: Assurance Disjunctivism Philosophy and Religious Studies Philosophy Richard Moran Speech acts Telling Testimony ab: A familiar criticism of so-called ‘assurance’ theorists is that they fail to demonstrate how testimony delivers a specifically epistemic reason. Whilst their accounts of the speech act of telling may do justice in various respects to our self-understanding as interlocutors – as agents who engage in the intentional act of telling and addressees who take tellers at their word – they at best explain how the act has a certain moral or pragmatic significance, but not how it is conducive to knowledge. In this essay, I show one way in which assurance theorists can meet this challenge. Drawing on Richard Moran’s elaboration of an assurance view, I argue that despite his wish to set questions of knowledge-acquisition to one side, the core ideas guiding his account suggest a certain epistemology of testimony, which I label the ‘Naïve view’. This view precisely offers an understanding of how assurances possess a distinctive epistemic significance. However, I go on to explain how both Moran’s elaborated account and Faulkner’s recent emendation to it preclude Naivety from the outset. As a result, I argue, their attempts to demonstrate how telling as an assurance has a sui generis epistemic significance are compromised. At fault in both cases is a prior commitment to a conjunctivist understanding of the epistemic value of telling. Whilst abandoning this commitment may strike most assurance theorists as a high price, it opens, I suggest, a path to rebutting their critics’ charge of epistemic irrelevance. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Synthese is a copyright of Springer, 2025. All Rights Reserved. item: Synthese holder: Springer Nature dt: @attributes: year: 2025 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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