The Norm of Moral Assertion: A Reply to Simion

Lewis, Max

doi:10.1007/s10677-019-10033-7

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Now, the case of producing understanding via testimony can be translated into other speech acts. Recently, it has been argued that moral assertions (saying, for instance, that eating meat is wrong) can generate moral understanding (Simion 2018 ; Lewis 2019 ; Kelp 2020 ). Thus, just as ordinary assertions can generate knowledge in the audience, moral assertions can produce (moral) understanding in the audience.…”

Section: True Explanationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Helping Others to Understand: A Normative Account of the Speech Act of Explanation

Gaszczyk

2023

Topoi

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This paper offers a normative account of the speech act of explanation with understanding as its norm. The previous accounts of the speech act of explanation rely on the factive notion of understanding and maintain that proper explanations require knowledge. I argue, however, that such accounts are too demanding and do not reflect the everyday practice of explanation and the attribution of understanding. Instead, I argue that the non-factive, objectual attitude of understanding is sufficient for a proper explanation. On the normative level, explanations are governed by an audience-centred norm, i.e., they are sensitive to the epistemic position of the audience. According to the proposed account, an explanation is a communicative act in which one puts the audience in a position to understand the explained phenomenon. This proposal fits into the recent wave of applications of the normative account and makes space for the pluralism of illocutionary acts.

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Section: True Explanationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Helping Others to Understand: A Normative Account of the Speech Act of Explanation

Gaszczyk

2023

Topoi

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“…She claims: At a context C, one's moral assertion that p is epistemically permissible only if (1) one knows that P and (2) one's assertion is accompanied by a C-appropriate explanation why P. (Simion 2018, 483) This is because, she says, the constitutive aim of moral assertion is to produce moral understanding, and to understand P is, in part, to know why P is true. Max Lewis has rightly argued that Simion's condition is too strong: what is needed is not an explicit articulation of the relevant moral explanation, but something in the conversational context that renders the explanation salient (Lewis 2019). In the vast majority of cases, the context allows hearers to get a grip on the intended normative explanation: if you tell me that meat-eating is wrong while we are watching a video on cruelty to animals, you don't need to say much at all to render your intended explanation salient.…”

Section: Epistemic Hazardsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A moral critique of psychological debunking

Smyth

2021

Journal of Social Philosophy

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Posing questions with a hammer and, perhaps, hearing in reply that famous hollow sound that indicates bloated intestines… what a pleasure for me, an old psychologist and pied piper; in my presence, the very things that want to keep quiet are made to speak out.-Nietzsche, "How To Philosophize With a Hammer" I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.-Abraham Maslow Suppose I am sincerely advising a friend on how to pursue her career in our organization. I encourage her to be mild, kind, and to seem unambitious around her superiors. A third party overhears our conversation and says to me: "You're only saying those things because you're afraid she'll get the positions you want." This is a paradigmatic case of a psychological debunking: a speech-act which expresses the proposition that a person's beliefs, intentions, or utterances are caused by hidden and suspect psychological forces. 1 On the face of it, it can seem as if this third-party has done both my friend and I a service by offering a psychological debunking of my utterances. But has he? In this paper, I wish to shed some light on some generally unacknowledged dangers involved in this activity. Of course, psychological debunking is not intrinsically suspect or confused; the origins of our mental states and activities matter to us, and they should matter to us. However, the activity of debunking is hazardous from a moral and social point of view, and this is something that ought to concern us far more than it does. A great deal of work has been done on the conceptual and normative status of debunking arguments (

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Moral Deference, Moral Assertion, and Pragmatics

Lewis

2020

Ethic Theory Moral Prac

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The Norm of Moral Assertion: A Reply to Simion

Cited by 4 publications

References 7 publications

Helping Others to Understand: A Normative Account of the Speech Act of Explanation

Helping Others to Understand: A Normative Account of the Speech Act of Explanation

A moral critique of psychological debunking

Moral Deference, Moral Assertion, and Pragmatics

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