SOURCE: "Moore's Paradox, Sincerity Conditions, and Epistemic Qualification," in On Being and Saying: Essays for Richard Cartwright, edited by Judith Jarvis Thomson, The MIT Press, 1987, pp. 133-50.

In the following essay, Caton attempts an epistemological examination of Moore's paradox.

I

This is not a scholarly paper on Moore's paradox. Many of the points I make have been made by others (long ago in some cases), and I hope they will acquiesce in my putting them in the present context without further acknowledgment. I want to suggest in this paper that a Moore paradox of the statemental type has to do with epistemic force rather than merely with sincerity conditions of illocutionary acts (if with them at all). Although something like a sufficient condition for an utterance to be odd in the Moore-paradoxical way will emerge, I do not try to say what conditions it is necessary to have...