WiP - Nate Lauffer / Hedging without ignorance
WiP - Nate Lauffer / Hedging without ignorance
Wednesday October 29, Nate Lauffer leads our Works in Progress meeting, discussing "Hedging without ignorance." The talk is abstracted below.
When a speaker non-defectively hedges with an attitude verb as in ‘P, I believe’ or ‘I believe that P,’ quite plausibly, they signal that they haven’t met the epistemic standard for asserting P outright. One might think that the standard in question is knowledge—an understandable thought on the assumption that knowledge is the norm of assertion (KNA). Thus, the speaker who hedges P with ‘I believe’ might be thought to signal ignorance of P. According to some authors, this insight pits KNA against the knowledge norm of belief (KNB). The reasoning goes: since a speaker self-ascribes belief by hedging with ‘I believe,’ KNB predicts that the speaker signals the possession of knowledge of the proposition they are hedging. But a speaker cannot felicitously signal both knowledge and ignorance of the same content simultaneously. KNA is therefore presumed to be part of a successful argument against KNB. But I argue that this line of objection to KNB fails, and in a way that’s fruitful for further inquiry. First, I argue that there are reasons for thinking that a speaker can non-defectively hedge without signaling ignorance of the hedged content. Second, I argue that the movement from S signals that she hasn’t met the epistemic standard for asserting P to S signals ignorance of P rests on a misunderstanding of KNA.