The trouble with the subjectivity of knowledge is that it cannot be
plainly stated in scientific or even philosophical terms. This has to do
with basic features of claiming.^26 Claiming is propositional. Claiming
that ptypically involves uttering a sentence that has pas its content or
that implies or implicates p. What does not figure in the utterance is the
very person making a claim, nor the act of claiming. Of course a speaker
might always add ‘I believe that p’ or ‘I claim that p’ whenever she
makes a claim to the effect that p. But this would be no improvement.
On the contrary, it would rather serve to undermine the hearer’s trust in
the sincerity of the very claim the speaker wants to make. This becomes
evident when we consider the special role that expressive vocabulary
like ‘I believe that’ or ‘I claim that’ plays in everyday discourse. ‘I claim
that p’ is used in situations of disagreement. A speaker Amight stick to
a certain claim by uttering ‘I claim that p’, especially if he has no fur-
ther reasons to offer in favour of p. We often take the utterance of the
phrase ‘I claim that’ as indicating that the speaker is running out of argu-
ments. ‘I believe that’ even serves as a means to make epistemic uncer-
tainty explicit. ‘I believe that p’ typically implicates ‘I am not too sure’.
The phrase ‘I know that’ usually has no place in our discursive games at
all.^27 In short: the use of expressive vocabulary to make epistemic or
doxastic states explicit is unnecessary for claiming. And according to
the familiar conversational maxim to avoid redundancy the utterance of
something that seemingly goes without saying indicates that precisely
this impression is wrong. So we usually take the occurrence of expres-
sive vocabulary in an utterance as a sign of uncertainty or doubt. To sim-
ply claim something usually means to leave oneself out of the claim.
One might call this a formal objectivity condition for ordinary truth- or
knowledge-claims.
It would be wrong, however, to infer from this objectivity condition
for ordinary truth- or knowledge-claims that there is no subjectivity
involved at all. Subjectivity does not figure in the claim itself, but it is
presupposed in the very act of claiming. This is why adding expressive
vocabulary like ‘I believe that’ or ‘I claim that’ is always possible. But
now we seem to be faced with a pragmatic dilemma. Either we stick to
the idea that a claim is made by a plain assertion and that expressive
vocabulary is unnecessary. This would mean that the discursive role of
the speaker remains inarticulate. Or we take the explicit mode of
expressing our discursive commitments and entitlements to be the stan-
dard form of claiming. This would imply that plainly asserting ‘p’ had to
be regarded as a mere shorthand for ‘I claim that p’. We would thereby
considerably weaken the assertive force of statements because making
A Prophecy Come True? Dante and Hegel on the End of Art 63