<i>Assertion: on the Philosophical Significance of Assertoric Speech</i>By Sanford G. Goldberg
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The idea that assertion is governed by a constitutive norm has received a lot of attention in recent years, with intense debate over what the precise formulation of the norm should be. But why should any of us be interested in that? In his new book, Sanford Goldberg aims to answer that question by showing how the hypothesis that assertion answers to an epistemic norm both explains the epistemic significance of assertion and has implications for a number of philosophically interesting phenomena. The result is an impressive work, with a lot to say about assertion and its connections to epistemology, language, mind and ethics. The book is arranged into four parts. Part I introduces the topic and presents an initial case for a norm-based account of assertion, contrasting it with rivals and defending it from recent objections levelled by Maitra (2010) and Cappelen (2010) among others. Part II argues that the hypothesis that assertion answers to an epistemic norm neatly explains assertion’s epistemic significance: its role in the communication of knowledge, and the entitlements and responsibilities generated by assertion for speakers and hearers. Part III explores the connections between assertion and a number of philosophically interesting phenomena in light of such a norm: topics include the method of interpretation (Ch. 4), assertoric content (Ch. 5), Moore’s paradox and norms of belief (Ch. 6), the ethics of assertion (Ch. 7) and anonymous assertion (Ch. 8). Part IV breaks from the rest and defends the view that the norm of assertion is context-sensitive.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".