Retraction and testimonial justification: a new problem for the assurance view
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Retraction and testimonial justification: a new problem for the assurance view Matthew Vermaire1
Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The Assurance View, as advanced by Angus Ross and Richard Moran, makes the epistemology of testimony a matter of interpersonal commitments and entitlements. More specifically, I argue, their position is best understood as claiming that for someone’s belief to be testimonially justified is for some speaker to bear illocutionary responsibility for its truth (while background conditions are met). With this understanding in hand, I present a problem for the view that has so far escaped attention, a problem deriving from the wide freedom we have to retract our assertions. Retraction dissolves the illocutionary responsibilities that were set up by preceding speech acts; but in some circumstances the epistemic significance of a retraction is effectively nil. We can therefore construct cases in which the responsibilities undertaken in testimony have been canceled, while the justification for belief based on it remains in place—and that shouldn’t be possible, if the Assurance View has things right. I present one such case and press its implications. Keywords Epistemology of testimony The assurance view Speech acts Retraction
1 Introduction ‘‘That rotten old oak behind my house fell over last night,’’ you say. And I believe you. Remarkable, right? You convey a certain proposition to me by testimony; without missing a beat, I add it to my doxastic stock. Moreover, in many ordinary cases, there’s nothing irrational about my doing so. In forming a belief about that old oak just on the basis of your word, I’m within my epistemic rights. & Matthew Vermaire [email protected] 1
University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA
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M. Vermaire
But if it’s clear that testimony can justify the beliefs we form in response to it, it’s not so clear why. That’s the question this paper is concerned with. I am going to present a new challenge to one answer to it, the one offered by what’s called the Assurance View—or at least the version of that view formulated by Angus Ross (1986) and Richard Moran (2005 and 2018). What’s distinctive about their position is the way it relates testimonial justification to illocutionary commitments and entitlements, normative relationships that hold between a speaker and her audience. I’ll explore this feature of the Assurance View in Sect. 2, which will set the stage for my thesis: I claim that the way the view treats illocutionary norms makes it vulnerable to a challenge based on the possibility of retraction—a sort of cancelling speech act commonly performed with phrases like ‘‘I take it back’’ or ‘‘never mind.’’ In Sect. 3, I investigate the nature of retraction itself. Finally, in Sect. 4, I show how it threatens the Assurance View.
2 Locating the assurance view One major dispute in the epistemology of testimony is about whether testimonial justification reduces to some more basic kind of justification, like the kind beliefs have when based on perception
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