Moorean Assertions and Their Normative Function
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Moorean Assertions and Their Normative Function Voin Milevski 1 Received: 31 May 2019 / Accepted: 29 October 2019/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract G. E. Moore famously pointed out that all sincere assertions of the form ‘p, but I don’t believe that p’ are inherently absurd. John Turri strongly disagrees with the consensus evaluation of such assertions as inherently absurd and offers a counterexample according to which it is possible to say ‘Eliminativism is true, but of course I don’t believe it’s true’ sincerely and without any absurdity. I argue in this paper that Turri’s attempt misses the point entirely, for the most natural interpretations of his counterexample are either absurd or do not represent genuinely Moorean assertions. The critical analysis of Turri’s counterexample will enable me to reach the general conclusion that precludes the possibility of omissive Moorean assertions that are inherently non-absurd (regardless of their content), at least if we hold that our assertions ought to have some normative function. Keywords Moorean assertions . Absurdity . Knowledge-transmission . Eliminativism .
Propositional attitudes
1 Moorean Assertions On G. E. Moore’s canonical view, there is something inherently absurd involved in any sincere assertion of a sentence that has one of the following syntactic forms: (a) ‘p, but I don’t believe that p’; (b) ‘p, but I believe that non-p.’ Let us call the assertions that have the same form (or syntax) as these, Moorean assertions. It is widely accepted in the relevant philosophical literature to use Sorensen’s (1988: 15) nomenclature and call the assertions of the form (a) ‘omissive’ (for they report a specific omission of the belief that is implied by the assertion) and the
* Voin Milevski [email protected]
1
University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy, Belgrade, Serbia
assertions of the form (b) ‘commissive’ (for they report the commission of a specific mistake in belief).1 Of course, although much more could be said about the distinction between these two forms of assertions, this should be enough for my purposes, for I will confine my attention entirely to the omissive form of Moorean assertions. But before doing so, I should like to provide a preliminary explanation of the absurdity involved in Moorean assertions. Intuitively, there appears to be a clear sense in which assertions of the form ‘p, but I don’t believe that p’ are absurd. But it is much more difficult to elucidate the source of this absurdity, especially given the fact that there is a large body of literature on this matter. Thus, whereas Moore’s own explanation of this absurdity is that in asserting p we imply that we believe p, despite the fact that in asserting p we neither assert that we believe p nor is our believing p entailed by our asserting p (Moore 1944: 203–204); other authors have claimed, for one reason or another, that Moorean assertions are falsified by their own utterance (Cohen 1950: 85– 87); that they are irrational (De Almeida 2007; Hintikka 1962: 67); that they ca
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