CONCEPT
Warranted Assertibility
Dummett's anti-realist criterion tying truth to recognizable grounds rather than to correspondence with a mind-independent reality—and the most precise vocabulary available for naming what is structurally absent from every assertion a language model produces.
Warranted assertibility is
Michael Dummett's answer to the question of what a speaker claims when she calls something true. Against the realist picture—in which a sentence is true if it corresponds to facts that may forever exceed our epistemic reach—Dummett argued that the meaning of a sentence is given by the conditions under which we would be
justified in asserting it: conditions we can recognize when they obtain, grounds we can actually have. His model was mathematics, where to assert a theorem true is to claim a proof exists, not to gesture at some platonic fact beyond all possible demonstration. The concept acquires its sharpest relevance not in the metaphysics of mathematics but in the analysis of
large language models, which produce assertions in the full assertoric mood—confident, well-formed, declarative—while standing in no recognitional relation whatever to the conditions that would warrant them. A language model says 'the bridge is safe' or 'the medication is effective at this dose' because,