Logos & Episteme

Volume 3, Issue 4, 2012

What I Learned in the Lunch Room about Assertion and Practical Reasoning

It is increasingly argued that there is a single unified constitutive norm of both assertion and practical reasoning. The most common suggestion is that knowledge is this norm. If this is correct, then we would expect that a diagnosis of problematic assertions should manifest as problematic reasons for acting. Jennifer Lackey has recently argued that assertions epistemically grounded in isolated second-hand knowledge (ISHK) are unwarranted. I argue that decisions epistemically grounded in premises based on ISHK also seem inappropriate. I finish by suggesting that this finding has important implications for the debates regarding the norms of assertion and practical reasoning.