Rachel McKinnon | College of Charleston

Rachel McKinnon

College of Charleston, Philosophy, Faculty Member

College of Charleston, Philosophy, Faculty Member |

Epistemology

Address: Charleston, SC

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Books

Norms of Assertion: Truth, Lies, and Warrant

This book is about the norms of the speech act of assertion. This is a topic of lively contempora... more This book is about the norms of the speech act of assertion. This is a topic of lively contemporary debate primarily carried out in epistemology and philosophy of language. Suppose that you ask me what time an upcoming meeting starts, and I say, “4 p.m.” I’ve just asserted that the meeting starts at 4 p.m. Whenever we make claims like this, we’re asserting. The central question here is whether we need to know what we say, and, relatedly, whether what we assert must be true. If the meeting is really at 3:30 p.m., you’ll be late, and probably rather upset that I told you the wrong time. In some sense, it seems like I’m on the hook for having said something false. This sense that I’ve done something wrong suggests that there are certain standards of evaluating assertions: a way of distinguishing between good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate. We call these standards norms. And so the debate about what, if any, norms govern the linguistic practice of assertion is known as the norms of assertion debate. When one’s assertion satisfies the norm, we say that the assertion is warranted. Various philosophers have typically focused their views of the norms of assertion on articulating the level of epistemic support required for properly asserting. Some argue, for example, that one must know what one asserts. Others argue that one merely needs to justifiably believe what one asserts–an epistemic standing weaker than knowledge. The purpose of this book is to defend what I propose as the central norm governing our practice of assertion, which I call the Supportive Reasons Norm (SRN). Here’s what it looks like: One may assert that p only if: (i) One has supportive reasons for p, (ii) The relevant conventional and pragmatic elements of the context are present, and (iii) One asserts that p at least in part because the assertion that p satisfies (i) and (ii). In rough outline, the standards for warrantedly asserting shift with changes in context, although knowledge is never required for warrantedly asserting. In fact, in some special contexts, speakers may warrantedly lie. This latter feature particularly sets apart my view from others in the debate. This also means that truth, knowledge, and even belief aren’t necessary conditions for warrantedly asserting.

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Papers

Survey Article: On the Nature of the Political Concept of 'Privilege'

The political notion of privilege is a concept that is much discussed, generates a great deal of ... more The political notion of privilege is a concept that is much discussed, generates a great deal of controversy, but is rarely analyzed. We aim to provide an analysis of privilege, including a novel taxonomy of types of privilege. Moreover, we think that getting clear on the nature of privilege can help make sense of some of the controversies and attending discussions of the concept. We also characterize and explain the resistance people described as having privilege often feel in these discussions. The upshot of our analysis is that we offer more effective strategies in how to think about efficacious political and discursive responses to privilege. Section 1 of the paper will offer a novel taxonomy of kinds of privileges. Section 2 offers formal schemas of the taxonomy from section 1. We distinguish between advantage, entitlement and benefit privilege in addition to distinguishing positive and negative privilege. In Section 3 we consider politically and dialectically efficacious responses to claims of privilege. In section 4, we raise one further distinction between overall and specific privilege and use the resources we've offered to analyze some real world cases of complaints about claims of privilege. Section 5 contains our concluding thoughts 1. Some Preliminaries A few preliminaries about the nature of privilege are in order. First, privilege in the political sense is properly attributed to groups primarily and to individuals derivatively. For example, white privilege is typically thought of as something that white people have as a group, and it confers privileges that members of the group have in virtue of being members of that group. White people have the privilege of not being harassed (as often) by the police in a range of cases that African Americans do suffer police harassment. But it may well be true that an individual white person gets harassed by police all the time because she is romantically involved with a police officer's ex. In one sense she lacks the privilege, but she lacks it for reasons external to how she is racialized. Second, and related to the first, individuals may and typically do belong to both privileged and underprivileged groups. Sometimes membership in a group will

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