I’ve just had a long conversation with a grad student about (inter alia) reporting and asserting. My first thought was that asserting is a special case of reporting, but one can report without asserting. For instance, I might have a graduate assistant write a report on some aspect of the graduate program, and then I could sign and submit that report without reading it. I would then be reporting various things (whether responsibly so would depend on how strong my reasons to trust the student were), but it doesn’t seem right to say that I would be asserting these things.
But then I came to think that just as one can report without asserting, one can assert without reporting. For instance, there is no problem with asserting facts about the future, such as that the sun will rise tomorrow. But I can’t report such facts, even though I know them.
It’s not really a question of time. For (a) I also cannot report that the sun rose a million years ago, and (b) if I were to time-travel to the future, observe the sunrise, and come back, then I could report that the sun will rise tomorrow.
And it’s not a distinction with respect to the quantity of evidence. After all, I can legitimately report what I had for dinner yesterday, but it’s not likely that I have as good evidence about that as I do that the sun will rise tomorrow.
I suspect it’s a distinction as to the kind of evidence that is involved. I am a legally bound reporter of illegal activity on campus. But I can’t appropriately report that a violation of liquor laws occurred in the dorms over the weekend if I know it only on the basis of the general claim that such violations, surely, occur every weekend. The kind of evidence that memory provides is typically appropriate for reporting, while the kind of evidence that induction provides is at least typically not.
Interestingly, although I can’t appropriately report that tomorrow the sun will rise, I can appropriately report that I know that the sun will rise tomorrow. This means that the reportable is not closed under obvious entailment.
4 comments:
The way you are using "report" corresponds to something like "eyewitness testimony" or "firsthand knowledge" --- except the first example of you signing the grad student's report. I am inclined to think that this is an equivocation on "report."
Your use of "assert [that P]" seems like it means "communicate that P, backed by a propositional attitude of belief that P."
How close am I?
RE: “I suspect it’s a distinction as to the kind of evidence that is involved. I am a legally bound reporter of illegal activity on campus. But I can’t appropriately report that a violation of liquor laws occurred in the dorms over the weekend if I know it only on the basis of the general claim that such violations, surely, occur every weekend.”
Isn’t this just because you would be reporting something that everyone already knows? Suppose you knew that it was just a part of your campus’s culture that a lot of students get together to embezzle money every weekend. If this was a well-known problem, the authorities probably wouldn’t appreciate hearing from you. But if they hadn’t heard about it yet, they probably would. In any case, you would be able to report.
Matthew:
The way the mandatory reporting laws seem to work, even things that everyone knows need to be reported by someone. For instance, in our training, I asked about this example. The student newspaper prints a story about an otherwise unreported crime. It turns out that even though everyone knows about this crime now, it still needs to be formally reported by someone. (However, I was also told I don't need to report it: it is the task of the faculty advisor to the student newspaper to report it at that point.)
Heath:
I am not sure. I think we use "report" more broadly. I can collate data from a number of other sources and report it all (with the extreme case being that I delegate the writing).
Another possibility is that you are using "report" for non-inferential knowledge only. Or maybe knowledge that is not inductively inferential. E.g. you can report that the sun rose yesterday, *if you saw it*, but not that it will rise tomorrow, because that is based on induction from many previous cases plus some knowledge of astronomy and physics. It seems you can also report the discovery of a mathematical theorem, and report *confirmation of* a scientific hypothesis, but you cannot report (the truth of) a scientific theory you have just confirmed.
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