ABSTRACT
And that distinguishing of one’s own score cannot be understood just as another piece of third-person knowledge. But this fact is built deeply into the structure of MIE. As will be recalled from my discussion of Gibbard’s paper, the deontic scorekeeping account is an account of discursive practice as social in the sense that it is articulated by the fundamental distinction of social normative perspective between attributing a commitment (to someone else) and acknowledging it (oneself). It is that basic distinction between deontic attitudes that fills in the “I-thou” form of sociality that is contrasted with more traditional “I-we” versions. This distinction is of the essence of the account of knowledge attribution (in connection with traditional tripartite JTB accounts)1 and its relation to assertion. And when (in chapter 8) we look at the propositional-attitude-ascribing locutions that make attributions explicit in the form of claimables, we see that we must sharply distinguish acknowledging a commitment from attributing it even to oneself. The whole notion of scorekeeping turns on scorekeepers’ mastery of this sort of “first-personality”. So invoking its necessity cannot serve as a reason to move beyond an assertion-based story that incorporates this distinction of social perspective.
