Abstract
This paper is about the norm of truth for assertion, which I henceforth call “The Truth Rule”, and is formulated as follows: “One ought to assert only what is true”. I argue that The Truth Rule as thus formulated is a norm for assertion in a specific sense. I defend the view that assertion is, by its nature, governed by the rule according to which one ought to assert only what is true.
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Notes
- 1.
In Frege: Philosophy of Language, in the chapter on “Assertion”, Dummett argues, “there is no such thing as a game in which the object is to try to lose”. We would better not say that two people are playing chess but that they have both agreed to try to lose, but we shall say that they are trying to win but that what they are playing is not chess, but a variant of it, in which players try to be checkmated rather than to checkmate the opponent’s king (Dummett 1973: 320).
- 2.
Thanks to the anonymous referee for bringing out this objection.
- 3.
Dummett’s remark is only about the idea that our means of identifying what game is being played is through the players’ intention of arriving at the winning position, but that this latter is not required in those cases where we have associated consequences, insofar as these consequences are in force at the end of the game and will make known which game was being played, whether a player played with the intention of winning or not.
- 4.
The question arises at this point as to the possibility of cheating in a game. It seems to me that, with respect to the acts within practices with definitional constitutive rules, cheating amounts to getting out of the act of which the constitutive rule is definitional –and not out of the practice as a whole. If one ‘castles’ while the squares between the king and the rook involved in castling are occupied, one cannot be said to have castled, while one can be said to have cheated with respect to the game of chess as a whole.
- 5.
- 6.
See Millikan (1984).
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Ebrahimi Dinani, M. (2019). The Truth Rule: Definitional or Essential?. In: Bella, G., Bouquet, P. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11939. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34974-5_7
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