Shifty Speech and Independent Thought Epistemic Normativity in Context

Shifty Speech and Independent Thought is a manifesto for epistemic independence: the independence of good thinking from practical considerations. Mona Simion defends the independence of thought from the most prominent threat that has surfaced in the last twenty years of epistemological theorizing: the phenomenon of shiftiness of proper assertoric speech with practical context.

This study does four things: firstly, it shows that, against orthodoxy, the argument from practical shiftiness of proper assertoric speech against the independence of proper thought from the practical does not go through, for it rests on normative ambiguation. Secondly, it defends a proper functionalist knowledge account of the epistemic normativity of assertion, in conjunction with classical invariantism about knowledge attributions. Thirdly, it develops the first integrated account of the normativity of constative speech. Lastly, it defends detailed normative accounts for conjecturing, telling, and moral assertion.

Mona Simion, University of Glasgow

Mona Simion is Deputy Director of the Cogito Epistemology Research Centre at the University of Glasgow. She works on a wide range of topics within epistemology, philosophy of language, ethics, and feminist philosophy.

Introduction
Part 1: The Thought/Speech Shiftiness Dilemma
1. The Context Shiftiness Dilemma Generalized
2. Epistemic WAMs
3. Pragmatic WAMs
4. KK Compatibilism
Part 2: Thought Invariantism and Speech Functionalism
5. Against the Shiftiness Dilemma
6. Assertion Functionalism and Context
7. Knowledge Norms for Constative Speech Acts
Part 3: Constatives in Context
8. The Epistemic Normativity of Conjecture
9. No Special Treatment for the Epistemic Normativity of Telling
10. A Special Case: Moral Assertion
Conclusion
References