Assurance and Warrant

Philosophers’ volume 14, no. 17 t seems undeniable that such second-personal speech acts as june 2014 promising A to φ1 and telling A that p serve at least in part to give Imprint I an assurance to the addressee. Whatever your other aims, part of what you’re doing when you promise or tell A is inviting A, whether sincerely or insincerely, to take you at your word.2 Though you may despair of getting A to accept it, since you may know that A does not regard you as worthy of his trust, the invitation seems to include an assurance that he can rely on you in some respect — or, hypothetically, Assurance and that he could, if only he’d get over his mistrust.3 Promisings and tell- ings differ, of course, in the content of the assurance. When you promise A to φ, you give A the assurance that you’ll φ and thereby that he has a reason to rely on you to φ in, for example, his planning in the Warrant meantime. But what is the content of your assurance when you tell A that p? Exactly how do you suppose he might rely on you? And how, if at all, is the reliance epistemic as opposed to merely practical?4 1. An addressed promise is sometimes more naturally expressed with a proposition rather than with a verb phrase (‘I promised her that I’d grade her paper tomorrow’ rather than ‘I promised her to grade her paper tomorrow’). But sometimes the verb-phrase version is more natural (‘I promised her to go’ rather than ‘I promised her that I’d go’). For simplicity I’ll treat the verb- phrase version as canonical. 2. Or at least: representing yourself as inviting A to take you at your word. See the next note. 3. As I’ll argue in section II, to say that you’re giving A an assurance that p does not entail that you’re aiming to convince A that p. So you can assure A even if Edward S. Hinchman you don’t care whether A believes you, and even if you do care but know that A will never believe you. And as I’ll begin to argue in section I, your ‘despair’ University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee of convincing him can be just as insincere as the assurance itself. When I say that these speech acts ‘serve to give’ an assurance, I mean that they represent the speaker as giving an assurance, not that the speaker must perform them with any particular attitude. As we’ll see, the assurances in question tran- spire at the level of illocutionary norms, not necessarily within the speaker’s psychology. 4. Two obvious proposals don’t take us very far. It’s natural to say that you assure A that p and thus that he can ‘rely on you that p.’ And this does make sense when the proposition in question concerns something you’re going © 2014 Edward S. Hinchman to do. Thus, if you’re planning to be in California next week, you can as- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons sure A that you’ll be there, inviting him to rely on your being there. Yet what would it be to invite A to rely on you that California was the 31st state or that Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. Californium is the 98th element? The formula, assuming it’s even grammati- <www.philosophersimprint.org/014017/> cal, suggests that you’re inviting A to rely on you to produce a justification edward s. hinchman Assurance and Warrant Here is the proposal I’ll pursue. If an assurance could create epistemic The proposal won’t help with my question, however, because it leaves warrant, then in telling A that p you could assure A by providing A out the act of assurance. Assuring A that p isn’t asserting that p with with warrant for believing that p. That would preserve a parallel with the thought that you thereby give A evidence for p, since you’re such promising, since in promising A to φ, you assure A by providing A with a reliable asserter (or believer). That formula omits the most basic a reason to perform (or not to avoid performing) acts that depend on respect in which you address people, converse with people — inviting your φing. Though the parallel would not itself explain anything about them to believe you, not merely what you say. I’ve defended that claim either promising or testifying,5 we can put it like this: each assurance in another paper, and Angus Ross, Gary Watson, Richard Moran, Paul provides its distinctive kind of reason: promising provides a practical Faulkner, and Benjamin McMyler have given other defenses.6 My aim reason, telling an epistemic reason (i. e. warrant). in this paper is to fill a crucial gap in what Moran calls the ‘assurance The proposal provokes an immediate objection, however, which view’ of testimony: to specify exactly how a testifier’s mere assurance I’ll devote the bulk of my argument to addressing. Though the details can create genuine epistemic warrant.7 The challenge for the assurance are tricky, it isn’t hard to see in broad outline how your promising view is to explain how it is specifically your assurance that p that helps can provide a practical reason, since whether there exists this reason A to know that p.8 depends on the state of your will, and the state of your will is something you — somewhat, somehow — control. But how could you control — at 6. My earlier paper is “Telling as Inviting to Trust,” Philosophy and Phenomeno- all — whether there exists the corresponding epistemic reason? And if logical Research 70 (2005), 562–587. Other versions of the assurance view are developed in Angus Ross, “Why Do We Believe What We Are Told?,” Ratio you cannot control this, how could you presume to provide the reason? 28 (1986), 69–88; Watson, “Asserting and Promising,” op. cit.; Richard Mo- One way you could provide it is by presenting yourself to A as a ran, “Getting Told and Being Believed,” Philosophers’ Imprint 5 (2005); Paul Faulkner, Knowledge on Trust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and reliable gauge of the truth. If you reliably speak the truth when you Benjamin McMyler, Testimony, Trust, and Authority (Oxford: Oxford University come out with elementary propositions of US history or of chemistry, Press, 2011). you could provide A with a warrant for believing on that basis that 7. As I’ll explain, I do not believe any other version satisfactorily meets the California was the 31st state or that Californium is the 98th element. challenges that I’ll address. My own earlier treatment needs the supplemen- tation that I here provide. I criticize McMyler’s and Faulkner’s treatments in my review of McMyler’s book in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, March of the proposition. But this further proposal confronts two immediate prob- 2012, and in “Can Trust Itself Ground a Reason to Believe the Trusted?,” Ab- lems: you may know you cannot produce the justification, say because you’re stracta, Special Issue VI: A Symposium on Paul Faulkner’s Knowledge on Trust, not very articulate, or you may know you simply won’t, say because you’re December 2012. about to die. Since the inarticulate and the dying can tell people things just 8. Insofar as one can, one should pursue the epistemology of testimony without as well as the rest of us, the assurance at the core of telling cannot be — in the assuming a position on any of the Big Debates in epistemology. My talk of first instance — an assurance that you’ll do anything. (For this point, see Gary ‘warrant’ should therefore be understood as neutral between internalist and Watson, “Asserting and Promising,” Philosophical Studies 117 (2004), 68–9.) externalist approaches to epistemic issues. We can put the core challenge to Perhaps, then, we’ll want to say that the assurance is simply an assurance the assurance view neutrally as follows: how could the mere fact that some- of epistemic warrant. We cannot assume this means an assurance that there is one has assured you that p improve your epistemic position vis-à-vis p? The warrant, since what we’re trying to understand is how assurance can take a mere fact that S has given A an assurance — ‘her word’ — that p cannot help A propositional object. We’ll need to explicate a more fundamental sense in to know that p unless S thereby either (à la internalism) offers A a new epis- which telling A that p gives A an ‘assurance of p’s warrant.’ And that’s what I’ll temic-justificatory status, or (à la externalism) puts A in a new knowledge- try to do in this paper. conducive state. (My argument will not in the end remain neutral between 5. Not only do I place no explanatory weight on the parallel, but (as I explain in internalism and externalism: see section VI below. My point here is that I am sections VII through IX) I regard it as revealingly imperfect. not assuming either position at the outset of my argument.) philosophers’ imprint – 2 – vol. 14, no. 17 (june 2014) edward s. hinchman Assurance and Warrant In what follows, I’ll develop and defend a view of how you might when but only when A has sufficient warrant for p — sufficient, that help your addressee to know that highlights the assurance at the core is, for epistemically reasonable belief, that p.

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