Responsible For Truth? Peirce on Judgment and Assertion

Abstract

We consider Peirce’s remarks on judgment focusing on the relations and distinctions between judgment, proposition, belief and assertion. Despite the subtlety of Peirce’s distinctions, we finally argue for a broad conception of judgment. The main reason for that is the difficulty of assessing our responsibility in judging and asserting if judgment and assertion are considered in a narrow and separate sense. The argument goes as follows. Being an act of assent, claims Peirce, judgment is in contrast to assertion: to simply assent is not to assert, for the first is an internal act while the second is external. But such an internal conception of judgment, contrasted to the external dimension of assertion, is in our opinion too narrow a one to account for the social and normative aspects of judging and even asserting. We argue for a broader conception of judgment, with assertion as one of its parts and modeled on the process of legal judgment. In these terms, the idea of someone being responsible for the truth of his assertions would be specified.