On Epistemic Warrant in Text

Abstract

Linguistic techniques used for formulating and for proving propositions in arts and in sciences do not solely depend on grammatical and lexical structures of national languages, they also belong to certain cultural traditions. Interpersonal relationships also influence the form and the content of scientific texts, they are governed by ethical principles of scholarly communication. The notion of ‘epistemic warrant of judgments’ used metaphorically gives a culture-dependent way for looking at the real-time processes of conjectures and refutations, where ‘epistemic default’ is not excluded. The logical ‘possibility’ and ‘probability’ themselves may be considered as culture-dependent, so that the possible-world pragmatics acquires a civilisational aspect. Empirical facts concerning relative frequencies of the use of certain lexical items are discussed in this paper. Thus, possibility is much more frequently mentioned in both scientific and in fictional text corpora in Latin, in French, in Spanish, in Italian, in English, in German, and in Russian. The concept of ‘improbability’ is much less frequent than ‘probability’.