Cappelen's Four Arguments Against N-Theories of Assertion

In his paper "Against Assertion" (to appear in Assertion, eds. Brown & Cappelen (2010), OUP), Herman Cappelen defends a bold thesis which he calls the No Assertion View:

No Assertion View: Sayings are governed by variable norms, come with variable commitments and have variable causes and affects. What philosophers have tried to capture by the term 'assertion' is largely a philosophers' invention. It fails to pick out an act-type that we engage in and it is not a category we need in order to explain any significant component of our linguistic practice. (Cappelen 2010: 1)

His strategy for defending the No Assertion View (hereafter NAV) is to argue straightforwardly against what he calls Normative Theories of Assertion, which he calls N-Theories of Assertion:

Normative Theories of Assertion (N-Theories of Assertion): An assertion is a saying essentially governed by one or more norms.

In a previous post on this blog, I considered Peter Pagin's arguments against Normative Accounts of Assertion; Cappelen's own arguments are quite distinct and quite interesting. In what follows, I will examine these arguments, after which I'll offer some critical remarks.

Argument 1: Modal Judgments about norm variability for 'assertions'


The following is my own formalisation of Cappelen's first argument against N-Theories of Assertion:

1. According to N-Theorists, there is a norm, N, such that it is impossible for there to be an assertion that is not governed by N.
2. If conceivability is a guide to possibility and we can conceive of paradigtmatic assertions as governed by norms other than N, N-Theories are false.
   
3. We can conceive of paradgmatic assertions as governed by norms other than N.
4. Therefore, N-Theories are false.
   

The crucial premise here is (3). In support of (3), Cappelen basically asks us to imagine first that someone (here, Mia) says 'that Mandy forgot to pay her cell phone bill last week.'

Call this act E. What we're interested in is whether E could have been performed under a variety of different default norms. In other words, we can ignore the question of just what norm governs E in this world, and just focus on whether we can conceive of it as governed by a variety of norms. If we can, we have direct evidence against all N-Theories... (Cappelen 2010: 10).

Cappelen then asks whether we could have conceived of Mia performing E if the default assumption was that:

• she only assert p if she believes that p
• she assert p only if she is committed to defending p in response to objections
• she only assert p if p is true (10)

As Cappelen see is, we can duly conceive of any of these possibilities being the case, though the N-Theorist must say no in 'all cases except those cases that happen to coincide with the theorists's favoured norm.' So (3) is true, and from (1-3) we get the conclusion that the No-Assertion view is false.


Argument 2: Actual Variability in Norms

1. There are context-sensitive norms governing sayings.
2. If the N-Theorist is correct, there cannot be context sensitive norms.
3. Therefore, the N-Theorist is not correct (2010: pp. 12-13)

Cappelen defends (1) somewhat dogmatically, by appeal to Janet Levin. The more interesting premise, though, is (2). Cappelen's sums up his reasoning behind (2) as follows:

It's not as if we can easily go from e.g. the Knowledge Norm to contextually variable norms, and leave the rest of the framework intact. Remember that according to N-Theorists, the norms that govern assertion are constitutive of the act--the norm tells us what assertion is. Different token acts in different contexts are acts of the same type because they are governed by the same norm (or set of norms) that govern all these acts, so it seems the theory provides no account of what makes it the case that all the token acts are of the same type. If the norms vary between contexts, it is hard to see how the appeal to norms can tell us what makes an assertion an assertion. (2010: 13)

Argument 3: We never accuse speakers of having 'broken the rule of assertion' or 'cheated in assertion'

According to Cappelen, 'You will never find speakers being described in any of these two ways (at least outside a philosophy text):

(a) That assertion was cheating.
(b) That assertion broke the rules

or, with no reference to 'assertion':

(a) That was cheating
(b) That broke the rules

Argument 4: Infrequency of Assertion Attributions

The main idea here is that, according to the N-Theorist, the 'default assumption when someone utters a declarative is that she has performed an N-Assertion.

If that were so, we should expect that there be a word for that speech act and that that word be the default description of the acts in question. It should be like chess and tennis--when people play those games, there are expressions that denote the activity of playin those games and those are the default descriptions of the players. But, it is not like that for the game of assertion we allegedly play. This, I take it, is some evidence that we don't play assertion games. (Cappelen 2010: 16)

Some critical remarks

First, a dialectical point. Cappelen's four arguments against N-Theorists are supposed to generalise; they are meant to undermine not only the most substantial rival to the No-Assertion View, the N-Theorist's View, but also three other candidate positions according to which some account of assertion can be given. Those other rival candidate positions he taxonomises as claiming that:

(ii) Assertions are those sayings that have certain effects
(iii) Assertions are those sayings that have certain causes
(iv) Assertions are those sayins that are accompanied by certain commitments

As a purely dialectical point, it's not entirely clear how Cappelen's arguments, as he says 'provide...a fairly straightforward model for how to argue against views of type (ii), (iii) and (iv).' (2010: 2). I'll set this matter aside, though. What's more interesting are his arguments against the N-Theorist's view.

As I see it, the N-Theorist will have an easier time rebutting against Arguments 3 and 4 than 1 and 2. With respect to Argument 3: the N-Theorist can simply refute the inference Cappelen makes from the fact that cheating accusations are not leveled as such in the 'assertion game', that therefore, there is no assertion game for which alleged-norm-violating assertions would play the role of a cheating move. Even if we grant Cappelen his observation that cheating accusations are uncommonly made, the N-theorist can still maintain their position and offer some explanation for why this is so: perhaps, for one thing, we use a variety of expressions to capture the idea that some rule is broken., when it is. To say 'someone is cheating' is a particularly germane way to capture this idea when the game at issue is competitive (like chess or tennis). It is plausible though to think that competitive games, where the word 'cheating' is used, are not the only activities of which rules are constitutive--and in non-competitive activities, we just capture the observation of rule-breaking with different declarative descriptions. For instance, Lynch (2009) and Shah (2005) have suggested that inquiry is a goal-directed activity and that the notion of belief is a normative one such that the truth norm (i.e. believe only what is true) is constitutive of (and individuating of) the very concept of belief. Normativism about belief is a plausible view, and consider that we don't use the word 'cheating' to criticise a belief in violation of the truth norm. We don't call false believers cheaters, we just tell them they got it wrong. To the extent that normativism about belief is a live option, and one whereby no cheating accusations are made as such, it seems that normativism about assertion (N-Theorists) needn't have their backs to the wall simply on the observation that cheating fouls aren't called, as such. Extending this defensive analogy we can see that Cappelen's observation that we don't refer to the game of assertion (as we do to the games of tennis and chess) loses traction as an argument that we don't play the assertion game. After all, we play the inquiry game, and we don't refer to it as such. This latter observation I think undercuts much of the force of Cappelen's Argument 4--an argument that relies on pointing out our infrequently reference to any assertion game, as such.

That being said, I think that Arguments 1 and 2 pose difficult problems for the N-Theorist. Argument 2 can be sidestepped so long as the N-Theorist gives up what Pagin (2008) calls the constitutivity thesis--the claim that it is in virtue of being governed by some rule that something counts as an assertion, and endorses instead the slightly watered down position according to which some norm uniquely characterises assertion. Such a position claims, according to Pagin (and assuming something like the knowledge norm to play the role of the relevant norm):

UC: An utterance u by speaker S is an assertion that p iff it is necessary that (u is correct iff S knows that p. (Pagin 2008: 4)

As Pagin says:

Without the constitutivity idea it may be held that there is some factor F that makes u into an assertion, and that it is in virtue of being an assertion that the rule applies to u.

Problematically, though, it seems that even if the N-theorist gives up the constitutivity claim and holds instead only UC, that Argument 1 still poses a problem. Specifically, the necessity claim upheld in UC looks threatened by Cappelen's conceivability argument.

What moves are available to the N-Theorist (now slightly watered down to UC)? One move is to deny Cappelen's contention that conceivability is a mark of possibility. But that route doesn't look promising. Plenty of people take conceivabilty as a mark of possibility, so the N-Theorist should address the criticism while taking on board this assumption of the argument.

That said: I think there are two routes of defense. The first is more concessionary, the second less so. The first strategy would be to defend the N-Theory by giving up the necessity claim as part of UC and claim instead that:

UC*: An utterance u by speaker S is an assertion that p iff (u is correct iff S knows that p. (Pagin 2008: 4)

UC* allows the possibility that in some worlds, assertion is governed by a norm other than the one (say the knowledge norm) that governs assertion in this world.

A second, less concessionary line would be to try to link assertion to inquiry. One could argue by the following very broad strategy: that the value of truth is unrestricted, and so that belief aims at truth in all possible worlds. Something is a belief iff necessarily it it aims at truth (or some such claim as the normativists about belief hold). From this, one might argue that the norms that govern inquiry fix what norms govern moves in the game of inquiry--questions, assertions, etc. This is of course a very loose sketch of how such an argument would go. I'm not sure if it's plausible. As I see it, though, something like this argumentative strategy would have to be employed to save N-theories of assertion that don't wish to water themselves down by dropping the 'necessity' claim that framed part of UC.