Abhinav Saxena
Glossary

Selfless assertion

Also called: selfless asserter, the creationist teacher case

Definition

Asserting what one does not believe because one recognises that the evidence supports it, as in Jennifer Lackey’s case of a creationist teacher who teaches evolution.

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A selfless assertion is the assertion of something the speaker does not believe, made because she recognises that the evidence supports it. Jennifer Lackey has used such cases against the view that testimony transmits a speaker’s belief or knowledge, and against belief- and knowledge-based norms of assertion. The best known is Stella, a high-school biology teacher and devout creationist who has mastered the evidence for evolutionary theory, teaches it competently and sincerely in the professional sense, and does not believe it. Her students, on her say-so, come to believe and, Lackey argues, to know.

The case has been read in three rival ways. Perhaps Stella believes after all, in some compartmentalised sense; I do not pursue this, since it threatens to make the belief condition unfalsifiable. Perhaps, in the spirit of Elizabeth Fricker, she is a conduit, and her students’ warrant traces to the textbook authors. Or perhaps belief should give way to reliable production by properly functioning competence, as in Graham’s unified account.

I grant Lackey her case. Stella selects, organises, corrects and improvises, and a student’s question gets answers no textbook contains. What makes hers a case of transmission is shown by an intervention: introduce into her textbook an error her competence can detect, and she flags it rather than teaching it; vary the evidence within the reach of what she can assess, and her assertions follow. Her production tracks the evidence through her own cognition, and her abstention from belief is an overlay, held for reasons that do not enter her teaching. That is original satisfaction of the Tracking Minimum, stated without appeal to how things are for Stella from the inside.

The lesson survives the conduit reading too: Stella would then satisfy the minimum derivatively, and belief would still be unnecessary while a connection to truth is retained. This is why selfless assertion does not open the door to language models. Stella shows that belief can go. She does not show that the endogenous truth-connection can.

Related terms

The statement view of testimonyJennifer Lackey’s view that testimonial knowledge is acquired from what speakers state rather than what they believe, so one can learn from a statement its speaker disbelieves.The knowledge norm of assertionThe thesis, defended by Timothy Williamson, that one must assert that p only if one knows that p, so that assertion is constitutively governed by knowledge.The endogeneity requirementThe clause of the Tracking Minimum requiring that a source’s connection to the truth hold through its own production process, not through a proxy on which that process depends.The Tracking MinimumA source can transmit testimonial knowledge that p only if the truth of p, or the evidence for it, figures in why the source asserts p, through its own operation.

Further reading

  1. Lackey, J. (2007). Norms of assertion. Noûs 41(4): 594–626.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0068.2007.00664.x
  2. Lackey, J. (2008). Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199219162.001.0001
  3. Fricker, E. (2006). Second-hand knowledge. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73(3): 592–618.doi.org/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2006.tb00550.x
  4. Graham, P. J. (2016). Testimonial knowledge: A unified account. Philosophical Issues 26: 172–186.doi.org/10.1111/phis.12082