R. Wolfe Randall

Current orthodoxy within philosophy of language maintains that knowledge is the constitutive norm of assertion (KNA). This dissertation challenges that monism by advancing and defending a contextualist norm of assertion (CNA): the epistemic threshold that licenses assertion is variant – where the attitude required by asserters is fixed by conversational context. When the discourse is practical and high-stakes, speakers ordinarily represent themselves as knowing; in characteristically theoretical contexts, most saliently academic philosophy, justified belief suffices. This project is motivated by a tension at the heart of current philosophical practice. If KNA were universal, skepticism about the very possibility of philosophical knowledge would imply that nearly every participant in live debates violates the governing norm of discourse. Simply weakening the rule to an invariant justified-belief norm looks attractive but encounters two formidable obstacles: (i) two decades of Williamson-style arguments that justified belief is too weak to regulate everyday assertion, and (ii) conciliationist pressure from peer disagreement that seems to undercut rational belief itself. CNA dissolves both problems once we recognize that assertion is a language-game with multiple rule-sets. Chapter 1 critiques norms of assertion drawn from or inspired by recent no-belief proposals, such as speculation (Goldberg), disagreement-insulated inclination (Barnett), suspecting-that (Carter), and endorsement (Fleisher). This chapter argues that following norms of assertion which replace belief with weaker attitudes would erode sincerity and epistemic transparency in philosophical inquiry. Chapter 2 defends the rational retention of belief amid philosophical disagreement by deploying an abductive diagnosis of disputes and distinguishing epistemic from sociological peerhood, thereby defusing standard conciliationist arguments. Chapter 3 examines the ethics of publishing without belief and introduces hedged advocacy claims as a practicable remedy that preserves cognitive diversity while deterring strategic insincerity. Chapter 4 articulates CNA in detail and defends the justified-belief norm of assertion (JBNA) as the rule operative in philosophical, aesthetic, and prognosticatory contexts, showing that it better explains Moorean conjunction data, unlucky-assertion cases, and speaker-challenge patterns than KNA. By treating assertion’s normativity as context-sensitive, CNA reconciles the demand for epistemic responsibility with the epistemic realities of controversial inquiry. It safeguards the practice of philosophical assertion without collapsing into permissive relativism, while preserving knowledge-level stringency where practical life requires it. In doing so, the dissertation offers a unified framework that explains why knowledge sometimes feels mandatory in giving directions yet optional in the seminar room.

How a group G can know that p has been the subject of much investigation in social epistemology in recent years. This paper clarifies and defends a form of non-supervenient, non-summative group knowledge: G can know that p even if none of the members of G knows that p, and whether or not G knows that p does not locally supervene on the mental states of the members of G. Instead, we argue that what is central to G knowing that p is whether G has an epistemic structure that is functioning appropriately in accord with the action-related purposes of the group, and this structure may include non-agential elements such as devices that retain or process information. We argue that recent objections to non-summative group knowledge given by Jennifer Lackey do not in fact succeed in undermining the view, but do help to clarify the nature of non-summative group knowledge. The main upshot of our response to Lackey’s objections is that groups put their knowledge into action in ways that often differ from how individuals do so, and social epistemologists should be careful to notice these differences, especially insofar as groups often structure themselves by employing various epistemically-relevant devices.