Craig Ferrie

Normative truth is particularly mysterious for proponents of Derek Parfit’s ‘non-realist cognitivism’. On this view, for an irreducibly normative proposition to be true, irreducibly normative properties “need not exist either as natural properties in the spatio-temporal world, or in some non-spatio-temporal part of reality” (Parfit, 2011, p. 486). Parfit does not explain, however, how such propositions get to be true. One possibility builds upon Crispin Wright’s notion of “superassertibility” (1992, 1995). This view ties truth to the notion of indefeasible warrant, relative to an accessible state of information. Given that superassertibility is, itself, a normative notion, however, it might be thought that this suggestion entails some kind of vicious, infinite regress. This article will outline two distinct arguments, the first, courtesy of Jussi Suikkanen (2016) and the second, novel, that purportedly show that this leads to such a regress before demonstrating that, in light of some highly plausible, iterative principles of warrant, both arguments fail. Moreover, it will outline an entailment of these principles which shows that, in at least one important way, superassertibility is just like truth.