Assertion

Edited by Ofra Magidor (University of Oxford)
About this topic
Summary

Assertion is a kind of speech act which plays a central role in both philosophy of language and epistemology. The main philosophical issues concerning assertion include: How to characterize which utterances of (declarative) sentences count as assertions? What, if any, are the norms governing assertion?  What effects do assertions have on the dynamics of conversation? What is the connection between assertion and the semantic content, meaning, or truth of sentences? What is the connection between what one asserts and what one believes or knows? How can we separate between what is asserted by an utterance and what is conveyed by it in more indirect means – such as presupposition or implicature? Are utterances of conditional sentences a kind of assertion, or a different type of speech act (a conditional assertion)?

These questions help to see why assertion plays such a central role in philosophy: for example, assertion plays a central role in the philosophy of language for anyone who thinks that there is a close connection between what is asserted by an utterance and what its semantic content or meaning is, and plays a central role in epistemology for anyone who thinks that assertions are governed by a norm involving knowledge or belief (e.g. assert only what you know or only what you believe). 

Key works

The classic text on speech acts in general is Austin 1962. For a central discussion on the norms of assertion, and a defence of the knowledge norm of assertion see Williamson 2000. The classic text on the distinction between assertion and presupposition is Strawson 1950, and between assertion and implicature Grice 1989Stalnaker 1978 is the key work on the effects that assertion has on the dynamics of conversation, and how assertion, context, and semantic content interact with each other. For a defence of the claim that utterances of conditionals are not assertions, but rather involve a special kind of speech act see Edgington 1995.

Introductions For general introductions see Pagin 2015 and also the introduction in Brown & Cappelen 2011. For an introduction on the issue of norms of assertion in particular see Weiner 2007.
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  1. An inferentialist account of lying.Kamil Lemanek - 2025 - Synthese 205:1-13.
    The inferentialism due to Robert Brandom presents a compelling normative-deontic picture of language and discursive practices, and as such it is well positioned to address phenomena like lying. This short work outlines a simple account of how lying can be conceptualized within that framework. To that end, the basic Brandomian position is extended to include a novel type of status – namely, pseudo-commitments, which are unique in their being non-binding. The traditional definition of lying is then given a status-oriented form, (...)
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  2. Merely verbal agreement, speaker-meaning, and defective context.Steffen Koch - 2025 - Synthese 205 (1):1-20.
    In a merely verbal agreement, a misunderstanding between two parties creates the false impression of agreement: one or both parties think they agree on something, when in fact they do not. There is reason to believe that merely verbal agreements are as common as merely verbal disagreements and disputes. Unlike the latter, however, merely verbal agreements have so far been ignored by philosophers. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to clarify what merely verbal agreement is by considering various (...)
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  3. Psychogenesis of text = Precursor of its Belated Sociogenesis.Morteza Shahram - manuscript
    (I) According to J.L Austin all speech and all utterance is the doing of something with words and signs, challenging a metaphysics of language that would posit denotative, propositional assertion as the essence of language and meaning. -/- (II) Since doing things with words implicates authorial intention and rationalization, writing a text implies a psychogenetical origin. -/- (III) The text in the process of charitable interpretation, as a sociolinguistic outcome and practice, acquires new meaning or significance by its claims being (...)
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  4. Judging for ourselves.Justin Khoo - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    Suppose I hear from a trusted friend that The Shining is scary. Believing them, I decide not to watch the film. Later, we're talking about the movie and I say, “The Shining is scary!” My assertion here is misleading and inappropriate—I misrepresent myself as having seen the film and judged whether it is scary. But why is this? In this paper, I clarify the scope of the observation, discuss existing explanations of it, and argue that they are all lacking. I (...)
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  5. Falsity and Retraction: New Experimental Data on Epistemic Modals.Teresa Marques - 2024 - In Dan Zeman & Mihai Hîncu (eds.), Retraction Matters. New Developments in the Philosophy of Language. Springer. pp. 41-70.
    This paper gives experimental evidence against the claim that speakers’ intuitions support semantic relativism about assertions of epistemic modal sentences and uses this evidence as part of a broader argument against assessment relativism. It follows other papers that reach similar conclusions, such as that of Knobe and Yalcin (Semant Pragmat 7:1–21, 2014). Its results were achieved simultaneously and independently of the more recent work of Kneer (Perspectives on taste. Aesthetics, language, metaphysics, and experimental philosophy. Routledge, 2022). The experimental data in (...)
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  6. La menzogna.Neri Marsili & Maurizio Mascitti - forthcoming - Aphex.
    La menzogna è oggetto di interesse di molte discipline, che spaziano dalla filosofia morale alla linguistica, dalla psicologia empirica alla giurisprudenza. Qualunque riflessione sulla menzogna, però, ha bisogno in primo luogo di stabilire l’oggetto della sua analisi: che cosa sia la menzogna, e in cosa differisca da altre forme di inganno e manipolazione. Questo articolo offre un’introduzione al dibattito filosofico sul concetto di menzogna, dalle prime riflessioni di Sant’Agostino fino alla filosofia contemporanea. Tratteremo della connessione fra la menzogna e altri (...)
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  7. Chatting with Bots: AI, Speech-Acts, and the Edge of Assertion.Iwan Williams & Tim Bayne - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper addresses the question of whether large language model-powered chatbots are capable of assertion. According to what we call the Thesis of Chatbot Assertion (TCA), chatbots are the kinds of things that can assert, and at least some of the output produced by current-generation chatbots qualifies as assertion. We provide some motivation for TCA, arguing that it ought to be taken seriously and not simply dismissed. We also review recent objections to TCA, arguing that these objections are weighty. We (...)
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  8. Aspects of a logical theory of assertion and inference.Ansten Klev - 2024 - Theoria 90 (5):534-555.
    The aim here is to investigate assertion and inference as notions of logic. Assertion will be explained in terms of its purpose, which is to give interlocutors the right to request the assertor to do a certain task. The assertion is correct if, and only if, the assertor knows how to do this task. Inference will be explained as an assertion equipped with what I shall call a justification profile, a strategy for making good on the assertion. The inference is (...)
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  9. Lying and Insincerity.Neri Marsili - forthcoming - In Hilary Nesi & Petar Milin (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier.
    What is lying? This entry provides a general overview of scholarly attempts to define lying in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. First, it addresses the distinction between lying and misleading, considering whether only explicit statements can be lies. The second topic is insincerity, and how it can vary in degrees under conditions of uncertainty. Its final part discusses whether lying requires an intent to deceive and genuine assertoric force.
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  10. International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (3rd edition).Hilary Nesi & Petar Milin (eds.) - forthcoming - Elsevier.
    Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics is the most authoritative, comprehensive and international reference work of its kind. Ground-breaking in its sheer scope – the 2nd edition had almost 3,000 chapters – no other linguistics reference work matches it for sheer broadness of coverage. Over the years it has been a much-loved and invaluable resource for researchers, academics, students and professionals in linguistics, anthropology, education, psychology, language acquisition and pathology, cognitive science, sociology and media/cultural studies. Led by a brand new and (...)
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  11. Hedging in Discourse.Peter van Elswyk - 2024 - Synthese 204 (3):1-31.
    Epistemic terms of various syntactic categories can uniformly be used to do the same thing—to hedge. This essay clarifies hedging as a phenomenon and explains how hedging happens by advancing the positional theory. The guiding idea is that, in uttering declaratives, speakers signal what their epistemic position is towards the content put into play by the declarative. The default signal is that the speaker knows. But when an epistemic term hedges, the term overrides the default. The non-default signal sent is (...)
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  12. Thinking Together: Advising as Collaborative Deliberation.Joshua Habgood-Coote - 2024 - Philosophers' Imprint 24 (1).
    We spend a good deal of time thinking about how and when to advise others, and how to respond to other people advising us. However, philosophical discussions of the nature and norms advising have been scattered and somewhat disconnected. The most focused discussion has come from philosophers of language interested in whether advising is a kind of assertive or directive kind of speech act. This paper argues that the ordinary category of advising is much more heterogenous than has been appreciated: (...)
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  13. Austin vs. Searle on Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts.Indrek Reiland - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    The central pillar of Austin’s theory of speech acts is the three-way distinction between locutionary acts like saying, illocutionary acts like asserting, and perlocutionary acts like persuading (Austin 1962: VIII-IX). While the latter distinction has been widely accepted, the former distinction has been frequently rejected due to Searle’s objections, who argued that since Austin’s locutionary acts are supposed to be forceful in the sense contrasting with neutral expression of a content and all force is by Austin’s own definition illocutionary, the (...)
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  14. The size of a lie: from truthlikeness to sincerity.Jessica Pepp - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Lies come in different sizes. There are little white lies, slight stretches, exaggerations, fibs, and whoppers. Such terms can reflect different aspects of lies, but one of these is how far a lie is from what the liar really thinks. This paper proposes that this dimension of lie-size reflects a scalar aspect of sincerity. Drawing inspiration from the study of truthlikeness, the paper elucidates this aspect of sincerity, which I call “truthful-likeness”. Truthful-likeness reflects how sincere a reply to a question (...)
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  15. The poet affirmeth.Emanuel Viebahn - manuscript
    This paper is concerned with fictive utterances, the authorial utterances that make up works of fiction. It is widely held that fictive utterances cannot be constative speech acts, such as assertions. Instead, fictive utterances are construed as pretended speech acts, as invitations to make-believe or as declarations. My aim is to challenge the non-constative consensus and to defend a view on which fictive utterances are constative speech acts after all, namely constatives that have a story as their target. I motivate (...)
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  16. (4 other versions)Calculus of Qualia 7: Equations vs. Qualations, Assertions with non-referential terms, Proofs, Logic.P. Merriam & M. A. Z. Habeeb - manuscript
    General Introduction: In [1] a Calculus of Qualia (CQ) was proposed. The key idea is that, for example, blackness is radically different than █. The former term, “blackness” refers to or is about a quale, whereas the latter term, “█” instantiates a quale in the reader’s mind and is non-referential; it does not even refer to itself. The meaning and behavior of these terms is radically different. All of philosophy, from Plato through Descartes through Chalmers, including hieroglyphics and emojis, used (...)
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  17. Positive & Negative Predication: Distinction Through Unity.Alexander Porto - manuscript
    In the history of philosophy, the distinction between positive and negative predication has been collapsed. The collapse has caused us to search for a way through Parmenides’ gate: we have constructed scaffolding to see over its boundaries. Kant gave us the distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual knowledge; Hegel gave us determinate negation; Frege gave us the negation stroke; Husserl gave us bracketing and disappointment; G. Spencer-Brown gave us a calculus of distinction. Despite this, we find ourselves—alongside Wittgenstein— wondering how it (...)
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  18. True lies and attempted lies.Emanuel Viebahn - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Sometimes speakers try to lie and inadvertently assert something true. Subjectivists about lying hold that such speakers are lying despite telling the truth. Objectivists hold that such speakers are not lying: they try to lie but fail. The first aim of this paper is to point to novel cases supporting subjectivism that do not involve speakers inadvertently asserting something true. Its second aim is to use these and other cases to explore the distinction between lying and trying to lie. Which (...)
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  19. Non-Factualist Interpretation of the Skeptical Solution and the Self-Refutation Argument.Michał Wieczorkowski - 2024 - Acta Analytica 39 (2):295-311.
    The skeptical solution is based on two assumptions — the rejection of semantic facts and the denial of semantic nihilism. On the basis of the non-factualist interpretation of this solution, these two assumptions are reconciled by stating that meaning ascriptions possess non-descriptive function. Nonetheless, Alexander Miller argues that this position is self-refuting since, as despite its non-descriptivism, by rejecting any kind of semantic facts, it inevitably leads to semantic nihilism. In this text, I demonstrate that Miller’s argument is not sound. (...)
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  20. Modality and the structure of assertion.Ansten Klev - 2023 - In Igor Sedlár (ed.), Logica Yearbook 2022. London: College Publications. pp. 39-53.
    A solid foundation of modal logic requires a clear conception of the notion of modality. Modern modal logic treats modality as a propositional operator. I shall present an alternative according to which modality applies primarily to illocutionary force, that is, to the force, or mood, of a speech act. By a first step of internalization, modality applied at this level is pushed to the level of speech-act content. By a second step of internalization, we reach a propositional operator validating the (...)
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  21. Unsettled Belief.Bob Beddor - forthcoming - The Philosophical Quarterly.
    According to many philosophers, belief is a settling state. On this view, someone who believes p is disposed to take p for granted in practical and theoretical reasoning. This paper presents a simple objection to this settling conception of belief: it conflicts with our ordinary patterns of belief ascription. I show that ascriptions of unsettled beliefs are commonplace, and that they pose problems for all of the most promising ways of developing the settling conception. I proceed to explore the implications (...)
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  22. Martin-Löf on the Validity of Inference.Ansten Klev - 2024 - In Antonio Piccolomini D'Aragona (ed.), Perspectives on Deduction: Contemporary Studies in the Philosophy, History and Formal Theories of Deduction. Springer Verlag. pp. 171-185.
    An inference is valid if it guarantees the transferability of knowledge from the premisses to the conclusion. If knowledge is here understood as demonstrative knowledge, and demonstration is explained as a chain of valid inferences, we are caught in an explanatory circle. In recent lectures, Per Martin-Löf has sought to avoid the circle by specifying the notion of knowledge appealed to in the explanation of the validity of inference as knowledge of a kind weaker than demonstrative knowledge. The resulting explanation (...)
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  23. How to Express Implicit Attitudes.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1):251-272.
    I argue that what speakers mean or express can be determined by their implicit or unconscious states, rather than explicit or conscious states. Further, on this basis, I show that the sincerity conditions for utterances can also be fixed by implicit states. This is a surprising result which goes against common assumptions about speech acts and sincerity. Roughly, I argue that the result is implied by two plausible and independent theories of the metaphysics of speaker meaning and, further, that this (...)
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  24. Clearing up Clouds: Underspecification in Demonstrative Communication.Rory Harder - 2023 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 53 (1):38-59.
    This paper explains how an assertion may be understood despite there being nothing said or meant by the assertion. That such understanding is possible is revealed by cases of the so-called ``felicitous underspecification'' of demonstratives: cases where there is understanding of an assertion containing a demonstrative despite the interlocutors not settling on one or another object as the one the speaker is talking about (King 2014a, 2017, 2021). I begin by showing how Stalnaker's ([1978] 1999) well-known pragmatic principles adequately permit (...)
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  25. What does it take to tell a lie?Emanuel Viebahn - forthcoming - In Alex Wiegmann (ed.), Lying, Fake News, and Bullshit. Bloomsbury. pp. 1-24.
    Lying requires asserting a disbelieved proposition, that much is widely accepted in the debate on how to define lying. But what else is required? Does lying require a particular linguistic manner of expression, such as saying? Does the proposition asserted have to be false (and not merely disbelieved)? And does lying require an intention to deceive? The aim of this chapter is to provide an opinionated introduction to the debates on these questions that takes into account both theoretical considerations and (...)
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  26. Meaning and responsibility.Ray Buchanan & Henry Ian Schiller - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (3):809-827.
    In performing an act of assertion we are sometimes responsible for more than the content of the literal meaning of the words we have used, sometimes less. A recently popular research program seeks to explain certain of the commitments we make in speech in terms of responsiveness to the conversational subject matter. We raise some issues for this view with the aim of providing a more general account of linguistic commitment: one that is grounded in a more general action‐theoretic notion (...)
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  27. The Hindi-Urdu NA and reasonable inference.Ahmad Jabbar - forthcoming - In Ahmad Jabbar & Pravaal Yadav (eds.), Proceedings of the 59th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 59).
    This paper presents a study into the Hindi-Urdu 'na' as a sentence-final particle. Although also used as a topic marker and negation, 'na' occurs sentence-finally across clause-types. In light of the data, we think the following hypothesis offers the best fit: 'na' signals the speaker’s belief that the content of na’s containing clause is a reasonable inference, given what’s common ground. Notably, in addition to other clause-types, we explore na's distribution in exclamations and exclamatives. We link our work to recent (...)
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  28. Lying with Uninformative Speech Acts.Grzegorz Gaszczyk - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (7):746-760.
    I propose an analysis of lying with uninformative speech acts. The orthodox view states that lying is restricted to assertions. However, the growing case for non-assertoric lies made by presuppositions or conventional implicatures challenges this orthodoxy. So far, the only presuppositions to have been considered as lies were informative presuppositions. In fact, uninformative lies were not discussed in the philosophical literature. However, limiting the possibility of lying to informative speech acts is too restrictive. Firstly, I show that standard, uninformative presuppositions (...)
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  29. Supposition: A Problem for Bilateralism.Nils Kürbis - 2023 - Bulletin of the Section of Logic 53 (3):301-327.
    In bilateral logic formulas are signed by + and –, indicating the speech acts assertion and denial. I argue that making an assumption is also speech act. Speech acts cannot be embedded within other speech acts. Hence we cannot make sense of the notion of making an assumption in bilateral logic. Attempts to solve this problem are considered and rejected.
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  30. Do Not Diagonalize.Cameron Kirk-Giannini - 2024 - In Ernie Lepore & Una Stojnic (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Language. Oxford University Press.
    Speakers assert in order to communicate information. It is natural, therefore, to hold that the content of an assertion is whatever information it communicates to its audience. In cases involving uncertainty about the semantic values of context-sensitive lexical items, moreover, it is natural to hold that the information an assertion communicates to its audience is whatever information audience members are in a position to recover from it by assuming that the proposition it semantically determines is true. This sort of picture (...)
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  31. Testimony as Joint Activity.Nicolas Nicola - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Miami
    Testimony is of epistemic and practical significance. It is of epistemic significance because majority of what we know and believe comes from being told. It is of practical significance because our agency can be undermined, bypassed, or overridden owing to systemic prejudices sustained by oppressive social or cultural practices and subsequently our routes to knowledge are either hindered or distorted. Things get more complicated when we introduce and examine how groups and other collectives testify and are recipients of testimony. For (...)
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  32. Group Assertions and Group Lies.Neri Marsili - 2023 - Topoi 42 (2):369-384.
    Groups, like individuals, can communicate. They can issue statements, make promises, give advice. Sometimes, in doing so, they lie and deceive. The goal of this paper is to offer a precise characterisation of what it means for a group to make an assertion and to lie. I begin by showing that Lackey’s influential account of group assertion is unable to distinguish assertions from other speech acts, explicit statements from implicatures, and lying from misleading. I propose an alternative view, according to (...)
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  33. Lies, Common Ground and Performative Utterances.Neri Marsili - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (2):567-578.
    In a recent book (_Lying and insincerity_, Oxford University Press, 2018), Andreas Stokke argues that one lies iff one says something one believes to be false, thereby proposing that it becomes common ground. This paper shows that Stokke’s proposal is unable to draw the right distinctions about insincere performative utterances. The objection also has repercussions on theories of assertion, because it poses a novel challenge to any attempt to define assertion as a proposal to update the common ground.
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  34. AI Assertion.Patrick Butlin & Emanuel Viebahn - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    Modern generative AI systems have shown the capacity to produce remarkably fluent language, prompting debates both about their semantic understanding and, less prominently, about whether they can perform speech acts. This paper addresses the latter question, focusing on assertion. We argue that to be capable of assertion, an entity must meet two requirements: it must produce outputs with descriptive functions, and it must be capable of being sanctioned by agents with which it interacts. The second requirement arises from the nature (...)
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  35. An empirical perspective on pictorial lies.Emanuel Viebahn & Alex Wiegmann - manuscript
    Theorists in the debate on how to define lying disagree whether it is possible to lie with pictures. At the same time, they agree that definitions of lying should be consistent with how laypersons use the term ‘lie’. This calls for an empirical perspective on whether ordinary usage allows for pictorial lies. The present paper provides some initial data on this question by reporting an experiment with 623 participants investigating layperson judgements about cases of insincere linguistic and pictorial communication. The (...)
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  36. Directing Thought.Henry Ian Schiller - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    I argue that directing is a more fundamental kind of speech act than asserting, in the sense that the conditions under which an act counts as an assertion are sufficient for that act to count as a directive. I show how this follows from a particular way of conceiving intentionalism about speech acts, on which acts of assertion are attempts at changing a common body of information – or conversational common ground – maintained by conversational participants’ practical attitude of acceptance. (...)
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  37. Contextology.Simon Goldstein & Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (11):3187-3209.
    Contextology is the science of the dynamics of the conversational context. Contextology formulates laws governing how the shared information states of interlocutors evolve in response to assertion. More precisely, the contextologist attempts to construct a function which, when provided with just a conversation’s pre-update context and the content of an assertion, delivers that conversation’s post-update context. Most contextologists have assumed that the function governing the evolution of the context is simple: the post-update context is just the pre-update context intersected with (...)
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  38. Stupefying.Michael Deigan - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22 (1).
    Assertions are often accepted without being understood, a phenomenon I call stupefying. I argue that stupefying can be a means for conversational manipulation that works through at-issue content, in contrast with the not-at-issue and back-door speech act routes identified by others. This shows that we should reject a widely assumed connection between attention and at-issue content. In exploring why stupefying happens, it also emerges that stupefying has important cooperative uses, in addition to its manipulative ones, and so should not be (...)
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  39. On the Connection between Lying, Asserting, and Intending to Cause Beliefs.Vladimir Krstic - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    According to one influential argument put forward by, e.g. Chisholm and Feehan, Pfister, Meibauer, Dynel, Keiser, and Harris, asserting requires intending to give your hearer a reason to believe what you say (first premise) and, because liars must assert what they believe is false (second premise), liars necessarily intend to cause their hearer to believe as true what the liars believe is false (conclusion). According to this argument, that is, all genuine lies are intended to deceive. ‘Lies’ not intended to (...)
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  40. Fictions that Purport to Tell the Truth.Neri Marsili - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (2):509-531.
    Can fictions make genuine assertions about the actual world? Proponents of the ‘Assertion View’ answer the question affirmatively: they hold that authors can assert, by means of explicit statements that are part of the work of fiction, that something is actually the case in the real world. The ‘Nonassertion’ View firmly denies this possibility. In this paper, I defend a nuanced version of the Nonassertion View. I argue that even if fictions cannot assert, they can indirectly communicate that what is (...)
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  41. (1 other version)Lying, Tell-Tale Signs, and Intending to Deceive.Vladimir Krstic - forthcoming - Dialectica:1-27.
    Arguably, the existence of bald-faced (i.e. knowingly undisguised) lies entails that not all lies are intended to deceive. Two kinds of bald-faced lies exist in the literature: those based on some common knowledge that implies that you are lying and those that involve tell-tale signs (e.g. blushing) that show that you are lying. I designed the tell-tale sign bald-faced lies to avoid objections raised against the common knowledge bald-faced lies but I now see that they are more problematic than what (...)
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  42. Lying and Insincerity.Eliot Michaelson & Andreas Stokke - 2018 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    Andreas Stokke presents a comprehensive study of lying and insincere language use. He investigates how lying relates to other forms of insincerity and explores the kinds of attitudes that go with insincere uses of language. -/- Part I develops an account of insincerity as a linguistic phenomenon. Stokke provides a detailed theory of the distinction between lying and speaking insincerely, and accounts for the relationship between lying and deceiving. A novel framework of assertion underpins the analysis of various kinds of (...)
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  43. Bilateral Inversion Principles.Nils Kürbis - 2022 - Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 358:202–215.
    This paper formulates a bilateral account of harmony that is an alternative to one proposed by Francez. It builds on an account of harmony for unilateral logic proposed by Kürbis and the observation that reading the rules for the connectives of bilateral logic bottom up gives the grounds and consequences of formulas with the opposite speech act. I formulate a process I call 'inversion' which allows the determination of assertive elimination rules from assertive introduction rules, and rejective elimination rules from (...)
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  44. Fragile Knowledge.Simon Goldstein - 2022 - Mind 131 (522):487-515.
    This paper explores the principle that knowledge is fragile, in that whenever S knows that S doesn’t know that S knows that p, S thereby fails to know p. Fragility is motivated by the infelicity of dubious assertions, utterances which assert p while acknowledging higher-order ignorance whether p. Fragility is interestingly weaker than KK, the principle that if S knows p, then S knows that S knows p. Existing theories of knowledge which deny KK by accepting a Margin for Error (...)
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  45. Global expressivism as global subjectivism.Lionel Shapiro - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (3):777-799.
    Huw Price holds that a recognizable version of expressivism about normative and modal language can be “globalized” so as to apply to all areas of discourse. He focuses on globalizing the anti-representationalism of expressivist theories. By contrast, this paper’s topic is the seldom-discussed way Price seeks to globalize the expressivist view that “non-descriptive” discourse exhibits subjectivity. I argue that Price’s own argument against the possibility of a purely objective domain conflicts with his anti-representationalism and is self-undermining. I then defend a (...)
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  46. Hedged testimony.Peter van Elswyk - 2022 - Noûs 57 (2):341-369.
    Speakers offer testimony. They also hedge. This essay offers an account of how hedging makes a difference to testimony. Two components of testimony are considered: how testimony warrants a hearer's attitude, and how testimony changes a speaker's responsibilities. Starting with a norm-based approach to testimony where hearer's beliefs are prima facie warranted because of social norms and speakers acquire responsibility from these same norms, I argue that hedging alters both components simultaneously. It changes which attitudes a hearer is prima facie (...)
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  47. Articulating Understanding: A Phenomenological Approach to Testimony on Gendered Violence.Charlotte Knowles - 2021 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 29 (4):448-472.
    ABSTRACT Testimony from victims of gendered violence is often wrongly disbelieved. This paper explores a way to address this problem by developing a phenomenological approach to testimony. Guided by the concept of ‘disclosedness’, a tripartite analysis of testimony as an affective, embodied, communicative act is developed. Affect indicates how scepticism may arise through the social moods that often attune agents to victims’ testimony. The embodiment of meaning suggests testimony should not be approached as an assertion, but as a process of (...)
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  48. Questions are higher-level acts.Michael Schmitz - 2021 - Academia Letters:1-5.
    Questions are not on all fours with assertions or directions, but higher-level acts that can operate on either to yield theoretical questions, as when one asks whether the door is closed, or practical questions, as when one asks whether to close it. They contain interrogative force indicators, which present positions of wondering, but also assertoric or directive force indicators which present the position of theoretical or practical knowledge the subject is striving for. Views based on the traditional force-content distinction take (...)
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  49. Conversational Epistemic Injustice: Extending the Insight from Testimonial Injustice to Speech Acts beyond Assertion.David C. Spewak - 2021 - Social Epistemology 35 (6):593-607.
    Testimonial injustice occurs when hearers attribute speakers a credibility deficit because of an identity prejudice and consequently dismiss speakers’ testimonial assertions. Various philosophers explain testimonial injustice by appealing to interpersonal norms arising within testimonial exchanges. When conversational participants violate these interpersonal norms, they generate second-personal epistemic harms, harming speakers as epistemic agents. This focus on testimony, however, neglects how systematically misevaluating speakers’ knowledge affects conversational participants more generally. When hearers systematically misevaluate speakers’ conversational competence because of entrenched assumptions about what (...)
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  50. Force, Content and the Unity of the Proposition.Gabriele Mras & Michael Schmitz (eds.) - 2021 - New York: Routledge.
    This volume advances discussions between critics and defenders of the force-content distinction and opens new ways of thinking about force and speech acts in relation to the unity problem. -/- The force-content dichotomy has shaped the philosophy of language and mind since the time of Frege and Russell. Isn’t it obvious that, for example, the clauses of a conditional are not asserted and must therefore be propositions and propositions the forceless contents of forceful acts? But, others have recently asked in (...)
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