Matthew A. Benton

What individuates the speech act of prediction? The standard view is that prediction is individuated by the fact that it is the unique speech act that requires future-directed content. We argue against this view and two successor views. We then lay out several other potential strategies for individuating prediction, including the sort of view we favor. We suggest that prediction is individuated normatively and has a special connection to the epistemic standards of expectation. In the process, we advocate some constraints that we think a good theory of prediction should respect.

Reference guide to Paul Grice and the literature arising from his work, particularly in philosophy of language and mind. Herbert Paul Grice (b. 1913–d. 1988) was a British philosopher and linguist, teaching at Oxford then at Berkeley, and one of the pivotal figures in philosophy during the 20th century. He wrote in many areas of philosophy, including the metaphysics of personal identity, logical paradoxes, the analytic/synthetic distinction, the philosophy of perception, philosophical psychology, and ethics. He also wrote on historical figures such as Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Kant. But his most significant contributions came in philosophy of language and mind, on meaning, intention, presupposition, conversation, and the theory of communication. Grice argued for an intention-based theory of meaning, and he was the first to illustrate the distinction between what came to be called semantic and pragmatic meaning, that is, between what a speaker’s utterance (or its utterance “type”) means in the abstract, and what else a speaker can mean by uttering it in a particular context. Grice highlighted this by an appeal to his framework of the Cooperative Principle and its Conversational Maxims, which are plausibly assumed by conversational participants and provide mechanisms for the ways in which speakers can "conversationally implicate" something beyond the literal meaning of what they say, and for how hearers can recover those "implicatures." Grice’s enduring influence on these topics helped found the burgeoning discipline in philosophy of language and linguistics now known as "pragmatics."

Expert testimony figures in recent debates over how best to understand the norm of assertion and the domain-specific epistemic expectations placed on testifiers. Cases of experts asserting with only isolated second-hand knowledge (Lackey 2011, 2013) have been used to shed light on whether knowledge is sufficient for epistemically permissible assertion. I argue that relying on such cases of expert testimony introduces several problems concerning how we understand expert knowledge, and the sharing of such knowledge through testimony. Refinements are needed to clarify exactly what principles are being tested by such cases; but once refined, such cases raise more questions than they answer.