Vol. 36 No. 1 (2016)
Articles

Assertion, Justificatory Commitment, and Trust

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  • Fernando Rudy Hiller
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36446/af.2016.30

Published 2016-05-01

Keywords

  • Aserción,
  • Justificación,
  • Brandom,
  • Inferencialismo,
  • Confianza
  • Asserting,
  • Justification,
  • Brandom,
  • Inferentialism,
  • Trustworthiness
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This paper discusses the commitment account of assertion (CAA), according to which two necessary conditions for asserting that p are the speaker's undertaking a commitment to justify her assertion in the face of challenges and the speaker's licensing the audience to defer justificatory challenges back to her. Relying on what I call the "cancellation test," and focusing on Robert Brandom's version of the CAA, I show that the latter is wrong: it is perfectly possible to assert that p even while explicitly disavowing the justificatory commitment and while refusing to issue a deferring license. Then I sketch an alternative to the CAA, the trust account of assertion, according to which speakers necessarily present themselves as trustworthy concerning p's truth whenever they assert p. I explain why this is different from undertaking a justificatory commitment, and offer some reasons for thinking that this is a more promising account.

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