Language is a human universal reflecting our deeply social nature. Among its essential functions, language enables us to quickly and efficiently share information. We tell each other that many things are true—that is, we routinely make assertions. Information shared this way plays a critical role in the decisions and plans we make. In Knowledge and the Norm of Assertion, a distinguished philosopher and cognitive scientist investigates the rules or norms that structure our social practice of assertion. Combining evidence from philosophy, psychology, and biology, John Turri shows that knowledge is the central norm of assertion and explains why knowledge plays this role. Concise, comprehensive, non-technical, and thoroughly accessible, this volume quickly brings readers to the cutting edge of a major research program at the intersection of philosophy and science. It presupposes no philosophical or scientific training. It will be of interest to philosophers and scientists, is suitable for use in graduate and undergraduate courses, and will appeal to general readers interested in human nature, social cognition, and communication.

Assertion is a term frequently used in linguistics and philosophy but rarely defined. This in-depth study surveys and synthesizes a range of philosophical, linguistic and psychological literature on the topic, and then presents a detailed account of the cognitive processes involved in the interpretation of assertions.

Assertion is a fundamental feature of language. This volume will be the place to look for anyone interested in current work on the topic. Philosophers of language and epistemologists join forces to elucidate what kind of speech act assertion is, particularly in light of relativist views of truth, and how assertion is governed by epistemic norms.

Presents an account of the speech act of assertion and defends the view that it is answerable to a constitutive norm and is suited to explaining assertions connections to other philosophical topics.

This book develops in detail the simple idea that assertion is the expression of belief. In it the author puts forward a version of 'probabilistic semantics' which acknowledges that we are not perfectly rational, and which offers a significant advance in generality on theories of meaning couched in terms of truth conditions. It promises to challenge a number of entrenched and widespread views about the relations of language and mind. Part I presents a functionalist account of belief, worked through a modified form of decision theory. In Part II the author generates a theory of meaning in terms of 'assertibility conditions', whereby to know the meaning of an assertion is to know the belief it expresses.

Sanford C. Goldberg presents a novel account of the speech act of assertion. He defends the view that this type of speech act is answerable to a constitutive norm--the norm of assertion. The hypothesis that assertion is answerable to a robustly epistemic norm is uniquely suited to explain assertion's philosophical significance--its connections to other philosophically interesting topics. These include topics in epistemology (testimony and testimonial knowledge; epistemic authority; disagreement), the philosophy of mind (belief; the theory of mental content), the philosophy of language (norms of language; the method of interpretation; the theory of linguistic content), ethics (the ethics of belief; what we owe to each other as information-seeking creatures), and other matters which transcend any subcategory (anonymity; trust; the division of epistemic labor; Moorean paradoxicality). Goldberg aims to bring out these connections without assuming anything about the precise content of assertion's norm, beyond regarding it as robustly epistemic. In the last section of the book, however, he proposes that we do best to see the norm's epistemic standard as set in a context-sensitive fashion. After motivating this proposal by appeal to Grice's Cooperative Principle and spelling it out in terms of what is mutually believed in the speech context, Goldberg concludes by noting how this sort of context-sensitivity can be made to square with assertion's philosophical significance.

When we make claims to each other, we're asserting. But what does it take to assert well? Do we need to know what we're talking about? This book argues that we don't. In fact, it argues that in some special contexts, we can lie.