Assurance An Austinian view of Knowledge and Knowledge Claims [Hardcover]

Claiming to know is more than making a report about one's epistemic position: one also offers one's assurance to others. What is an assurance? In this book, Krista Lawlor unites J. L. Austin's insights about the pragmatics of assurance-giving and the semantics of knowledge claims into a systematic whole. The central theme in the Austinian view is that of reasonableness: appeal to a 'reasonable person' standard makes the practice of assurance-giving possible, and lets our knowledge claims be true despite differences in practical interests and disagreement among speakers and hearers. Lawlor provides an original account of how the Austinian view addresses a number of difficulties for contextualist semantic theories, resolves closure-based skeptical paradoxes, and helps us to tread the line between acknowledging our fallibility and skepticism.

Preface
1. The speech act of assurance
2. Austinian semantics
3. Austinian semantics and linguistic data
4. Paradox, Probability, and Inductive Knowledge
5. Idiosyncrasy, disagreement and the reasonable person standard
6. Assurance and radical skepticism
Bibliography
Index

One of the big achievements of Lawlor's book is to mine Austin's works, bringing these various elements together and presenting them in a systematic manner. The other is to display the distinctiveness and power of the resulting view, applying it to perennial epistemological problems (most notably, skepticism) and relating it to currently much-discussed debates (centrally, about the semantics of knowledge attributions) and puzzles (disagreement, the lottery, and others). The result is a welcome contribution to contemporary epistemology, especially given the importance that linguistic considerations have recently assumed in the latter. Throughout, the discussion is clear and insightful and full of fresh thinking about familiar and important issues. I learned from it; other epistemologists will too. --International Journal£P