Jinwoo Heo

Consider a society with vast income and wealth inequality—a society that has an overclass that enjoys tremendous riches and an underclass that suffers from abject conditions. On a visit there, you gather that the public’s attention is consumed by the question, Should the government fund space tourism?. Despite your belief in free speech in the public sphere, you might think something is wrong with this particular issue consuming so much attention in such a society. Should members of the public not be calling attention to their failure to distribute resources fairly? Many would share this intuition. Yet, it is hard to specify what is wrong with putting the question Should the government fund space tourism? up for public debate. I attribute this hardship to political epistemologists’ undue focus on the doxastic realm and their subsequent blindness to the zetetic realm. Epistemically speaking, the standard view of political speech classifies questions as requests for information. I argue against this account of questions and present a way in which we can effectively undermine the idea that questions are epistemically innocent by appealing to an epistemic norm of relevance. While my account unmasks the epistemic defect of questions raised in the public sphere, it also shows the limitations of epistemic critique and occasions further theorizing on a moral theory of public relevance.

Lackey’s (2007) class of “selfless assertions” is controversial in at least two respects: it allows propositions that express Moorean absurdity to be asserted warrantedly, and it challenges the orthodox view that the speaker’s belief is a necessary condition for warranted assertibility. With regard to the former point, I critically examine Lackey’s broadly Gricean treatment of Moorean absurdity and McKinnon’s (2015) epistemic approach. With regard to the latter point, I defend the received view by supporting the knowledge account, on which knowledge is the necessary condition for warranted assertion. After examining two defenses of KA, by Montminy and Turri, I propose two alternative approaches. Although I remain neutral between them, I develop in more detail the view which classifies “selfless assertions” as “presentations”, a type of assertives distinct from genuine assertions. This account is motivated further by allowing for the expansion of the normative approach to other assertives, a feature we may be interested in, in the light of a recent wave of normative accounts of speech acts.