Rachel McKinnon, “The Norms of Assertion: Truth, Lies, and Warrant” (Palgrave McMillan, 2015)
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What is the central claim of McKinnon’s “Norms of Assertion” book?
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Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talese, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Rachel McKinnon, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the College of Charleston. Her new book, The Norms of Assertion, Truth, Lies, and Warrant, is just out from Palgrave Macmillan. One of the important ways we use language is to make assertions, roughly to pass on information we believe to be true to others.
Insofar as we need to learn by means of what others tell us, assertion is a speech act that addresses this need. It also follows norms. Ordinarily, we shouldn't assert things that we believe to be false, and when we do, we have violated a norm of assertion. In her new book, McKinnon argues against the prevailing idea that you do need to know what you assert, and she holds that we can even blamelessly assert something that we know to be false. Instead, she defends a reasons-based norm in which the end goal of transmitting knowledge to others can be fulfilled by asserting falsehoods. and in which whether we have satisfied the norm depends in part on the conventional and pragmatic context in which we make our assertions.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Rachel McKinnon, are you there? I am. Hi, welcome to New Books and Philosophy. Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to talking about your new book, The Norms of Assertion, Truth, Lies, and Warrant, which is a very provocative book that challenges, I guess, the prevailing view or the most prominent view nowadays of what it is to assert something warrantedly. Before we get into the details of the book, I'd like to start with a little bit of background on how you got to philosophy and how you came to write this particular book. And in your case, you had a footnote at one point where you mentioned that you used to be a professional poker player for six years or something, and that you never had a net losing month during that entire time.
So I suppose connecting the dots here includes not just how you got to philosophy, but how you got from poker to philosophy to norms of assertion and philosophy of language.
Sure. Well, I didn't start my undergrad in philosophy, which I've come to realize is pretty normal. I was actually in kinesiology or sports science and eventually transitioned into chemistry. And I was on a work term thinking about sorts of questions about the scientific method and how we think about these things.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central claim of McKinnon’s “Norms of Assertion” book?
0:00–6:43
2
How did Rachel McKinnon’s career path lead her from poker to philosophy of language?
6:43–14:06
3
What are assertions and why do they involve social norms?
14:06–22:49
4
What is the “supportive reasons” norm and how does it differ from the traditional knowledge norm?
22:49–31:27
5
Why does the knowledge norm fail to handle cases like the Bohr‑model physics teacher?
31:27–39:09
6
How does McKinnon’s performance‑normativity account for luck and outcomes?
39:09–48:01
7
In what ways do gender and race shape the norms of assertion and lead to epistemic injustice?
48:01–59:03
8
What future projects is McKinnon pursuing after “The Norms of Assertion”?
59:03–1:01:43
Speakers
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