Sharing Knowledge: A Functionalist Account of Assertion

Description

Assertion is the central vehicle for the sharing of knowledge. Whether knowledge is shared successfully often depends on the quality of assertions: good assertions lead to successful knowledge sharing, while bad ones don't. In Sharing Knowledge, Christoph Kelp and Mona Simion investigate the relation between knowledge sharing and assertion, and develop an account of what it is to assert well. More specifically, they argue that the function of assertion is to share knowledge with others. It is this function that supports a central norm of assertion according to which a good assertion is one that has the disposition to generate knowledge in others. The book uses this functionalist approach to motivate further norms of assertion on both the speaker and the hearer side and investigates ramifications of this view for other questions about assertion.

Christoph Kelp is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He is author of Inquiry, Knowledge and Understanding (2021) and co-editor of Virtue Theoretic Epistemology (with John Greco, Cambridge, 2020). Mona Simion is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. She is author of Shifty Speech and Independent Thought (2021) and co-editor of Reasons, Justification, and Defeat (with Jessica Brown, 2021).