Assurance and Warrant

One might wonder how a form of justice or injustice could be grounded in a form of reliability or unreliability. If S invites A to rely on her strength or speed, she incurs a kind of responsibility to be reliably strong or fast in the way that she presents herself as being. But this is not an illocutionary responsibility, and it does not involve the species of justice that I’ve characterized. The case in which S incurs an illocutionary responsibility to A differs from other cases in which she incurs a responsibility by inviting him to rely on her, and the difference lies in how her illocutionary invitation presumes to give A a reason grounded directly in an aspect of the invitation itself. As we’ve seen, the illocutionary invitation expresses an assurance that constitutively presents S as reliable on the question not merely of the truth of her assertion but of its capacity to provide A with epistemic warrant. That is, S is presenting herself not merely as bearing some impersonal property — whether truth-conducive reliability or some variety of strength or speed — that makes her relevantly reliable but as bearing an attitude toward A that makes her specifically reliable for him, in his specific context of needs. When you invite someone to rely only on your status as truth-conducively reliable — as you might do when you ‘back off’ your telling with the caveat “Don’t take my word for it: look it up, you’ll see!” — you incur the sort of responsibility that you incur when you invite someone to rely on your strength or speed. In those cases, you are responsible to be as you represent yourself as being, and your addressee will accordingly hold you thus responsible. But there need be no question of doing justice to or of normatively acknowledging your addressee in any of these cases. The distinctively normative element enters only insofar as you present yourself a providing him with a reason grounded partly in that very act of assurance. Here, the closure-conducive reliability that informs the assurance is not merely an impersonal property of yours, but the relational attitude and competence whereby you recognize or acknowledge your addressee by doing justice to his epistemic needs. In this case, though crucially not in the others, we cannot understand the nature of your reliability without viewing it as a response to a question of justice.