Objecting and quiescing, Aptly

Abstract

Objecting to asserted falsehood is an everyday practice. Despite its apparent ubiquity however, there remains a distinct dearth of discussion of objecting in the epistemology literature, with the small amount of extant scholarship focusing primarily on the prescriptive—that is, epistemic duties to object. The spotlight being placed so has elided a key area of research which seems to precede any prescriptive discussion; namely, evaluative norms about what makes for a good objection. After all, knowledge that one ought to object lacks utility if one does not also know how to well discharge such a duty. Thus, in this paper, I build a complete picture of the evaluative normativity of objecting based on a Sosan performance‐normative framework, neatly answering the question of what is an epistemically good objection—it is an apt one. The view is then extended to explain a novel area: the evaluative normativity of forbearance from objecting, what I call quiescing.