Abstract

Speaker-occasion meaning is the meaning and communicative "thrust" lent an utterance, by a speaker, on a particular occasion of utterance. While such meaning is plausibly interpreted as a function of communication-intentions on the part of the uttering agent, the most popular version of such an analysis, that of Paul Grice, is--I argue--bankrupt. ;In seeking a grip on the essential communication-intentions of communicative agents, one might turn to the commitments which these intentions create. Assertion, for example, entails a speaker commitment to the fact asserted. While several theorists have touched upon the relation of assertion to its commitments, the issues remain relatively undeveloped. My aim is to explore the relation of commitment to speaker's meaning, and the manner in which this relation can aid our understanding of the speaker's communication intention. ;I approach the subject by providing an analysis of interpersonal commitment. The analysis I suggest sees commitment as founded in a presentation of evidence by the committing agent. Such an explication has strong parallels with evidentiary or expectation analyses of promising, and like these it readily explains the obligations which the relevant acts produce. At the same time it avoids the traditional objections to evidentiary accounts in virtue of the better-developed notion of evidence which it employs. ;Applying this analysis of commitment to indicative speaker-occasion meaning, an evidence-presentation analysis of assertion is suggested--an analysis of assertion as hinging on the speaker's presentation of evidence that he is following a prototypical "truth-telling" pattern of action in producing his utterance. Once the involved notion of evidence has been properly understood, this analysis proves a viable communication-intention explication of indicative speaker-occasion meaning, and one superior to the Gricean analyses which preceded it