Recent arguments for relativist semantic theories have centered on the phenomenon of “faultless disagreement.” This paper offers independent motivation for such theories, based on the interpretation of predicates of personal taste in certain attitude contexts and presuppositional constructions. It is argued that the correct interpretation falls out naturally from a relativist theory, but requires special stipulation in a theory which appeals instead to the use of hidden indexicals; and that a hidden indexical analysis presents problems for contemporary syntactic theory.

In response to an accusation of having said something inappropriate, the accused may exploit the difference between the explicit contents of their utterance and its implicatures. Widely discussed in the pragmatics literature are those cases in which arguers accept accountability only for the explicit contents of what they said while denying commitment to the implicature. In this paper, we sketch a fuller picture of commitment denial. We do so, first, by including in our discussion not just denial of implicatures, but (...) also the mirror strategy of denying commitment to literal meaning and, second, by classifying strategies for commitment denial in terms of classical rhetorical status theory. In addition to providing a systematic categorization of our data, this approach offers some clues to determine when such a defence strategy is a reasonable one and when it is not. (shrink)

Overconfidence is typically damaging to one’s reputation as a trustworthy source of information. Previous research shows that the reputational cost associated with conveying a piece of false information is higher for confident than unconfident speakers. When judging speaker trustworthiness, individuals do not exclusively rely on past accuracy but consider the extent to which speakers expressed a degree of confidence that matched the accuracy of their claims (their “confidence-accuracy calibration”). The present study experimentally examines the interplay between confidence, accuracy and (...) a third factor, namely evidence, in the assessment of speaker trustworthiness. Experiment 1 probes the hypothesis that overconfidence does not backfire when a confident but inaccurate claim is justified: the trustworthiness of a confident speaker who turns out to be wrong is restored if the confidence expressed is based on strong evidence (good confidence-evidence calibration). Experiment 2 investigates the hypothesis that confidence can backfire if a confident and accurate claim is not justified: the trustworthiness of a confident speaker who turns out to be right is damaged if the confidence expressed is based on weak evidence (bad confidence-evidence calibration). Our results support both hypotheses and thus suggest that “confidence-evidence calibration” plays a crucial role in the assessment of speaker trustworthiness. (shrink)

The strongest objection to (15) is that speaker's meaning is defined in terms of commitment, a notion which is itself something of a challenge and for which no definition has been given. This would be a strong reason to prefer a definition in terms of some more tractable concept, all things being equal; but it does not lessen the probability that commitment or some similar notion is indispensable to the definition of speaker's meaning.The philosophical writings discussed in this (...) paper all proceed something like this: Particular cases are discussed and a description is given of the mechanisms by which communication takes place. An attempt is made to say something that applies to all instances of speaker's meaning. Words like ‘analysis’, ‘account’ ‘explanation’, ‘explication’, and ‘theory’ are used here, the suggestion being that the objective is to provide for all cases at once what has already been provided for particular cases-an explanation of how meaning works. What is produced, however, looks like adefinition of speaker's meaning, a statement of necessary and sufficient conditions. This definition is then evaluated largely in terms of what counterexamples it does or does not allow.It seems that there is some tendency to conflate two quite distinct objectives: (i) a theory of speaker's meaning-a general description of how it is that speakers are able to communicate; and (ii) a statement of necessary and sufficient conditions for speaker's meaning. Objective (i) might plausibly be regarded as the goal of the study of communication. Objective (ii) is the definition of a certain intuitive, pretheoretical concept of meaning, which might or might not prove to be an important concept with respect to objective (i). The Gricean mechanism and the notion of conventional meaning, on the other hand, are indispensable to (i)-few instances of speaker's meaning could be adequately described without recourse to at least one of these notions. Thus nothing in this paper should be construed as trying to downgrade the importance of the Gricean mechanism for the theory of communication. If objective (ii) and the Gricean mechanism are not as closely associated as has been claimed, this is, if anything, a reason to doubt the importance of (ii) for the theory of communication. (shrink)

How can we capture the intuitive distinction between lying and misleading? According to a traditional view, the difference boils down to whether the speaker is saying (as opposed to implying) something that they believe to be false. This view is subject to known objections; to overcome them, an alternative view has emerged. For the alternative view, what matters is whether the speaker can consistently deny that they are committed to knowing the relevant proposition. We point out serious flaws (...) for this alternative view, and sketch a simpler alternative that incorporates key insights of the traditional view. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker always focuses on the hearer in her account of testimonial injustice. It is the hearer who, in virtue of a prejudice, commits testimonial injustice against the speaker by giving her less credibility than she deserves. My purpose in this paper is to analyse a parallel type of testimonial injustice that runs in the opposite di- rection, from the speaker to the hearer. I characterise the inner structure of this type of injustice and sketch some of the (...) forms it can take. Then I explore some consequences of this kind of testimonial injustice by the speaker. (shrink)

Emanuel Viebahn accounts for the distinction between lying and misleading in terms of what the speaker commits to, rather than in terms of what the speaker says, as on traditional accounts. Although this alternative type of account is well motivated, I argue that Viebahn does not adequately explain the commitment involved in lying. He explains the commitment in lying in terms of a responsibility to justify one's knowledge of a proposition one has communicated, which is in turn elaborated (...) in terms of being able to consistently dismiss a challenge to justify that knowledge. But whether one can consistently dismiss such a challenge, as Viebahn defines this, depends on whether one is responsible for justifying one's knowledge. Without further specification of the nature of this justificatory responsibility, it is difficult to assess whether it is one that liars have but misleaders lack. (shrink)

Shared Content as Speaker Meaning Cappelen and Lepore have recently emphasised the significance of a minimal notion of perfectly shared content for pragmatic theories. This paper argues for a similar notion, but assumes that a satisfactory defence cannot be achieved along the lines of the existing debate between Minimalism and Contextualism. Rather, it is necessary to consistently distinguish two functional domains: the subjective processing domain and the interpersonal domain of communication, each with its own kind of utterance meaning. I (...) will argue that it is the mutually recognised content of the speaker's overt commitment that should be identified as ‘speaker meaning’. Diverging from the Gricean tradition, it is conventionally restricted, but genuinely pragmatic. Functional considerations show that it is, moreover, unnecessary to include further elements in ‘speaker meaning’. The distinction between two notions of utterance meaning with very different characteristics allows us to integrate the assumption of perfect sharing, which explains people's trust in communication, and the subjectivity of the hearer's inferences into a coherent and powerful model. (shrink)

I argue for the recognition of a particular kind of interest that one has in freedom of expression: an interest served by expressive activity in forming and discovering one’s own beliefs, desires, and commitments. In articulating that interest, I aim to contribute to a family of theories of freedom of expression that find its justification in the interests that speakers have in their own speech or thought, to be distinguished from whatever interests they may also have as audiences or (...) third parties for speech. Although there are many differences among such speaker-centered theories, a core commitment that most share is that expressive liberty plays a fundamental role in securing or constituting some form of individual self-realization. My account is a defense and elaboration of what I take to be one specific way in which the nature of such self-realization should be understood. In my proposal, self-realization is sometimes internally related to the very activity of expression, viz, expressing ourselves is one way in which we come to form and know our own minds. (shrink)

Deceptive implicatures are a subtle communicative device for leading someone into a false belief. However, it is widely accepted that deceiving by means of deceptive implicature does not amount to lying. In this paper, we put this claim to the empirical test and present evidence that the traditional definition of lying might be too narrow to capture the folk concept of lying. Four hundred participants were presented with fourteen vignettes containing utterances that communicate conversational implicatures which the speaker believes (...) to be false. We further collected several potential proxy measures of lying, to get a better understanding of when a deceptive implicature is considered a case of lying. The results indicate that most implicatures (ten out of fourteen) were evaluated as lies and that lie ratings were closely tracked by the degree to which speakers were considered to have committed themselves to the truth of the content conveyed by their deceptive implicatures. (shrink)

Two parallelism hypotheses have been adopted and the third one on their relationship has been put forward. The illocutionary logic hypothesis states that the logic of linguistic commitments runs parallel to the logic of intentionality. The normative pragmatics hypothesis states that the logic of utterances runs parallel to the logic of linguistic commitments. According to the third stance or the logic projection hypothesis, the logic of utterances is the origin of all other logics used in describing psychological and (...) social realities. Consequently, the imperative logic or logic of utterances constitutes an independent but not self-sufficient research topic. The logic of utterances manifests itself in its meaning effects such as deontic and bouletic ones. It can be studied only in relation to deontic logics of the hearer’s obligation and the speaker’s linguistic commitments and in relation to logics of intentionality of the speaker’s expression and the hearer’s impression. Therefore, research in logic of imperative and other utterances must include investigation of relations between logics. (shrink)

In this paper I critically discuss Miranda Fricker’s ‘trust-based’ view of collective testimony—that is, testimony that comes from a group speaker. At the heart of Fricker’s account is the idea that testimony involves an ‘interpersonal deal of trust’, to which the speaker contributes a commitment to ‘second-personal epistemic trustworthiness’. Appropriating Margaret Gilbert’s concept of joint commitment, Fricker suggests that groups too can make such commitments, and hence that they, like individuals, can ‘enter into the second-personal relations of (...) trust that characterise testimony’ (Fricker 2012: 272). I argue that this choice to appropriate Gilbert’s concept of joint commitment betrays a deep problem in Fricker’s account—a misconstrual of both the object and the subject(s) of the commitment a speaker makes in testifying. After developing this criticism, I outline an alternative way of construing the speaker’s commitment, which can be applied to both collective and individual testimony. (shrink)

Most accounts of the derogatory meaning of slurs are semantic. Recently, Nunberg proposed a purely pragmatic account offering a compelling picture of the relation between derogatory content and social context. Nunberg posits that the semantic content of slurs is identical to that of neutral counterparts, and that derogation is a result of the association of slur use with linguistic conventions of bigoted speakers. The mechanism responsible for it is a special kind of conversational implicature. However, this paper argues that Nunberg’s (...) proposal suffers from technical and conceptual problems regarding the application of the concepts of implicature and convention. It is proposed that the implicature mechanism should be replaced by expressive commitment attribution. The account advocated here preserves crucial insights of Nunberg’s analysis, 25–48, 2013a, Analytic Philosophy 54, 350–363, 2013b; Bolinger Nous, 51, 439–462, 2017), giving them a firmer conceptual basis. It supports a distinction between derogation and offensiveness of slurs that improves on the one proposed by Hom and May, 293–313 2013), and sheds light on puzzling borderline cases: the use of slurs by ignorant speakers and controversies surrounding the status of some words as potentially slurs. (shrink)

The paper outlines the analysis of certain question types in the Commitment Space framework, as presented in Krifka (2015). The two basic ideas are: Assertions and most questions involve commitments of speaker and addressee to the truth of a proposition, and questions consist in restricting the continuation of the conversation to answers to the question. The main focus is on breadth, not depth and the detailed comparison with alternative approaches, and on semantic modelling, not on the syntactic and (...) prosodic realizations. Topics are polar questions and their bias, alternative questions, constituent questions, high negation in questions, declarative questions, root vs. embedded questions, and deliberative questions. (shrink)

This paper discusses the commitment account of assertion, according to which two necessary conditions for asserting that p are the speaker's undertaking a commitment to justify her assertion in the face of challenges and the speaker's licensing the audience to defer justificatory challenges back to her. Relying on what I call the "cancellation test," and focusing on Robert Brandom's version of the CAA, I show that the latter is wrong: it is perfectly possible to assert that p even (...) while explicitly disavowing the justificatory commitment and while refusing to issue a deferring license. Then I sketch an alternative to the CAA, the trust account of assertion, according to which speakers necessarily present themselves as trustworthy concerning p's truth whenever they assert p. I explain why this is different from undertaking a justificatory commitment, and offer some reasons for thinking that this is a more promising account. (shrink)

I argue for the Cooperative Warrant Thesis (CWT), according to which the determinants of testimonial contents in communication are given by the practical requirements of cooperative action. This thesis distances itself from conventionalist views, according to which testimony must be strictly bounded by conventions of speech. CWT proves explanatorily better than conventionalism on several accounts. It offers a principled and accurate criterion to distinguish between testimonial and non-testimonial communication. In being goal-sensitive, this criterion captures the role of weak and robust (...) cooperation in determining the contents to which speakers testify or fail to testify. And, finally, it yields a principled explanation of why testimony entails the epistemic commitments that distinguish it as an epistemic source. (shrink)

Hart offers a biologically based explanation for the use of an ‘epistemic positioning strategy’ aimed by speakers/writers at the legitimization of assertions, at persuading addressees of the veracity of the propositions, as a prior condition for the discursive legitimization of actions. This article focuses on various issues addressed in Hart’s article, among them the degree of commitment invoked in speakers/writers’ choice of epistemic stance expressions as legitimization strategies, as well as the expression of subjectivity/intersubjectivity in discourse and the degree to (...) which this involves responsibility and accountability for the speaker/writer. The article also provides an alternative proposal of the categories identified by Bednarek for the conceptual domain of evidentiality. (shrink)

I argue for the Cooperative Warrant Thesis (CWT), according to which the determinants of testimonial contents in communication are given by the practical requirements of cooperative action. This thesis distances itself from conventionalist views, according to which testimony must be strictly bounded by conventions of speech. CWT proves explanatorily better than conventionalism on several accounts. It offers a principled and accurate criterion to distinguish between testimonial and non-testimonial communication. In being goal-sensitive, this criterion captures the role of weak and robust (...) cooperation in determining the contents to which speakers testify or fail to testify. And, finally, it yields a principled explanation of why testimony entails the epistemic commitments that distinguish it as an epistemic source. (shrink)

When is an indirect report of what a speaker meant correct? The question arises in the law. The Contract Law case of Spaulding v. Morse is a good example. Following their 1932 divorce, George Morse and Ruth Morse entered into a trust agreement in 1937 for the support of their minor son Richard. In that agreement, George promised to “pay to [Spaulding as] trustee in trust for his said minor son Richard the sum of twelve hundred dollars per year, (...) payable in equal monthly installments on the first day of each month until the entrance of Richard D. Morse into some college, university or higher institution of learning beyond the completion of the high school grades, and thereupon, instead of said payments, amounting to twelve hundred dollars yearly, he shall and will then pay to the trustee payments in the sum of twenty-two hundred dollars per year for a period of said higher education but not more than four years.” Richard graduated from high school on February 5, 1946 and, in the post-WWII continuation of the draft, was inducted into the army the following day. The question in the case is whether George, by the words of the trust agreement, meant that he would pay $1,200 per year for Richard’s support while he was in the army. Is that a correct indirect report of what George meant?The explanation I offer assumes Gricean analysis of speaker meaning, and it emphasizes the role of speaker meaning typically plays in solving coordination problems. A coordination problem is a situation “in which each person wants to participate in a group action but only if others also participate.” A classic example is a political protest: “each person might want to take part in an antigovernment protest but only if there are enough total protesters to make arrests and police repression unlikely.” Coordination problems arise in more mundane settings as well – in Spaulding v. Morse, for example. Ruth and George want to mutually agree on Richard’s support: Ruth wants to commit to an arrangement only if George does, and vice versa for George. In 1937, George and Ruth solved the problem through speaker meaning. By signing the trust agreement, George, with Ruth as his audience, meant that he obligated himself to a particular support agreement. When Ruth signed, she, with George as her audience, meant that she accepted the agreement. In general, parties often solve coordination problems through speaker meaning. If, for example, enough people can communicate their commitment to participate in the protest to enough people, the protest will take place.The account assigns a central role to the fact that speaker meaning facilitates coordination by creating relevant common knowledge. Common knowledge is “the recursive belief state in which A knows X, B knows X, A knows that B knows X, B knows that A knows X, ad infinitum.” Common knowledge facilitates coordination: “Actors coordinate when they have evidence for common knowledge, and refrain from coordinating when they do not.”. (shrink)

Provides an account of how necessary subjective syntactic investments on the part of speakers affect the semantic contents of their words and the possibilities for their thought-contents.

Since at least as far back as the infamous Derek Bentley case of the 1950s in which an unarmed 19-year-old was convicted and executed for murder based on his alleged uttering of the words _let him have it_ to his gun-wielding accomplice, the issue of incitement has been positioned firmly as an object of interest for forensic linguists. An example of a language crime—i.e. an unlawful speech act (as reported by Shuy in Language crimes: The use and abuse of language (...) evidence in the courtroom, Wiley Blackwell, Hoboken, 1993) the features of incitement—formalized as _intentionally encouraging or assisting others to commit an offence_ in the law of England & Wales under section 44 of the Serious Crime Act 2007 (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2007/27/contents)—have been widely debated by linguists and legal scholars alike. This paper draws on two webinars hosted by The Hunting Office in August 2020, which were subsequently leaked by the Hunt Saboteurs Association. Featuring senior figures from the hunting community addressing a nationwide audience of hunt masters, the webinars led to a police investigation and subsequent prosecution and conviction of one of the main speakers, Mark Hankinson, for _encouraging or assisting others to commit an offence under the Hunting Act 2004_. In this paper I explore what, linguistically, is meant by _encouraging or assisting_. Through corpus-assisted pragmatic and discourse analyses I interrogate the webinars to address the question of how precisely Hankinson implied his encouragement of illegal hunting with dogs. The phenomena of collocation and semantic prosody are crucial for understanding how such meanings came to be attached to the contributions Hankinson makes to the webinars. Moreover the paper will examine the contributions of other speakers and demonstrate that the same incriminating linguistic patterns in Hankinson’s talk are also evident in that of those who were not prosecuted. (shrink)

The fallacy of ignoring qualifications, or secundum quid et simpliciter, is a deceptive strategy that is pervasive in argumentative dialogues, discourses, and discussions. It consists in misrepresenting an utterance so that its meaning is broadened, narrowed, or simply modified to pursue different goals, such as drawing a specific conclusion, attacking the interlocutor, or generating humorous reactions. The “secundum quid” was described by Aristotle as an interpretative manipulative strategy, based on the contrast between the “proper” sense of a statement and its (...) meaning taken absolutely or in a certain respect. However, how can an “unqualified” statement have a proper meaning different from the qualified one, and vice versa? This “linguistic” fallacy brings to light a complex relationship between pragmatics, argumentation, and interpretation. The secundum quid is described in this paper as a manipulative argument, whose deceptive effect lies in its pragmatic dimension. This fallacy is analyzed as a strategy of decontextualization lying at the interface between pragmatics and argumentation and consisting of the unwarranted passage from an ut-terance to its semantic representation. By ignoring the available evidence and the presumptive interpretation of a statement, the speaker places it in a different context or suppresses textual and contextual evidence to infer a specific meaning different from the presumable one. (shrink)

Surprisingly little has been written about hedged assertion. Linguists often focus on semantic or syntactic theorizing about, for example, grammatical evidentials or epistemic modals, but pay far less attention to what hedging does at the level of action. By contrast, philosophers have focused extensively on normative issues regarding what epistemic position is required for proper assertion, yet they have almost exclusively considered unqualified declaratives. This essay considers the linguistic and normative issues side-by-side. We aim to bring some order and clarity (...) to thinking about hedging, so as to illuminate aspects of interest to both linguists and philosophers. In particular, we consider three broad questions. 1) The structural question: when one hedges, what is the speaker’s commitment weakened from? 2) The functional question: what is the best way to understand how a hedge weakens? And 3) the taxonomic question: are hedged assertions genuine assertions, another speech act, or what? (shrink)

I outline what I call the ‘deniability problem’, explain why it is problematic, and identify the range of utterances to which it applies (using religious discourse as an example). The problem is as follows: To assign content to many utterances audiences must rely on their contextual knowledge. This generates a lot of scope for error. Thus, speakers are able to make assertions and deny responsibility for the proposition asserted, claiming that the audience made a mistake. I outline the problem (a (...) limited version of which Fricker 2012 discusses), before explaining why it is problematic. Firstly it blocks testimonial knowledge according to assurance views. Secondly it prevents epistemic buck passing (the importance of which is emphasized by Goldberg 2006 and McMyler 2013). Finally, it removes a key disincentive to dishonesty. The recent literature on context sensitivity (particularly Cappelen and Lepore 2004) seems to entail that the problem applies to a very wide range of utterances. I consider a series of responses which fail to provide a solution, but which help us narrow down the scope of the problem. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWide-ranging semantic flexibility is often considered a magic cure for contextualism to account for all kinds of troubling data. In particular, it seems to offer a way to account for our intuitions regarding embedded perspectival sentences. As has been pointed out by Lasersohn [2009. “Relative Truth, Speaker Commitment, and Control of Implicit Arguments.” Synthese 166 : 359â374], however, the semantic flexibility does not present a remedy for all kinds of embeddings. In particular, it seems ineffective when it comes to (...) embeddings under operators with truth evaluative adverbs such as ‘correctly believes that’ and ‘incorrectly believes that’ and under factive verbs. This paper takes a closer look at the problematic embedding data with respect to predicates of personal taste. It argues that there is indeed no semantic solution for contextualism but a pragmatic way out. (shrink)

In this chapter, we discuss the distribution and lexical properties of common varieties of negative polarity items (NPIs) and positive polarity items (PPIs). We establish first that NPIs can be licensed in negative, downward entailing, and nonveridical environments. Then we examine if the scalarity approach (originating in Kadmon and Landman 1993) can handle the attested NPI distribution and empirical variation. By positing a unitary lexical source for NPIs—widening, plus EVEN— scalarity fails to capture the fact that a significant number of (...) NPIs are not scalar, and does not predict correctly NPI distribution in nonveridical contexts. It also misses the variation within the scalar class between broader (any) and narrow NPIs (either). Finally, scalarity predicts weaker effects (contradictions, presupposition failures) with ill-formed NPIs than is actually the case. The variation approach (Giannakidou 1998, 2001, 2007), on the other hand, posits that besides scalarity, NPIs can be created because of the presence of a variable in the NPI that cannot be interpreted deictically. This approach, by allowing more lexical sources for NPIs, is consistent with the diversity of NPIs, and extends easily to PPIs, which, as a class, appear to be non-scalar (Szabolcsi 2004 for some). Here one can again advance the argument that PPI-status is due to various sources including referentiality (some), and speaker commitment (with PPI adverbs; Ernst 2008). (shrink)

In everyday conversation, messages are often communicated indirectly, implicitly. Why do we seem to communicate so inefficiently? How speakers choose to express a message (modulating confidence, using less explicit formulations) has been proposed to impact how committed they will appear to be to its content. This commitment can be assessed in terms of accountability – is the speaker held accountable for what they communicated? – and deniability – can the speaker plausibly deny they intended to communicate it? We (...) investigated two factors that may influence commitment to implicitly conveyed messages. In a preregistered online study, we tested the hypothesis that the degree of meaning strength (strongly or weakly communicated) and the level of meaning used by the speaker (an enrichment or a conversational implicature) modulate accountability and plausible deniability. Our results show that both meaning strength and level of meaning influence speaker accountability and plausible deniability. Participants perceived enrichments to be harder to deny than conversational implicatures, and strongly implied content as more difficult to deny than weakly implied content. Furthermore, participants held the speaker more accountable to content conveyed via an enrichment than to content conveyed via an implicature. These results corroborate previously found differences between levels of meaning (enrichment vs. implicature). They also highlight the largely understudied role of meaning strength as a cue to speaker commitment in communication. (shrink)

: In this paper I argue that there is a very important, though often neglected, dissimilarity between the two Gricean conceptions of ‘what is said’: the one presented in his William James Lectures and the one sketched in the ‘Retrospective Epilogue’ to his book Studies in the Way of Words. The main problem lies with the idea of speakers' commitment to what they say and how this is to be related to the conventional, or standard, meaning of the sentences uttered (...) in the act of saying. Since the later notion of ‘what is said’, or ‘dictiveness’, is claimed to be logically independent from ‘formality’ (roughly, conventional meaning), Grice seems to maintain that there are cases in which content that is not expressed by a sentence in a context may nevertheless count as what is said. I propose an account of what is said that brings together the two apparently irreconcilable approaches. The price to be paid for a Gricean, however, is to accept a duality of behaviour between (natural language counterparts of) logical constants and logical variables. (shrink)

Speakers typically use the sentence “I will go to the store” to simultaneously express an intention to go to the store and a belief that they will go to the store. This is consonant with two popular theses about intentions: first, intending to j implies believing that one will j; second, intending to j commits one to j-ing. In this paper, I argue that at least one of these theses is false. I do so by exploring what speakers express when (...) they utter a sentence with a slightly different form, like “I will probably go to the store” in a typical situation. After laying down a framework for thinking about this sort of communication, I explore some different things speakers might express with this sentence in different situations. Most importantly, I argue that in some typical situations speakers express either ordinary intentions but not beliefs or partial intentions that don’t commit them to performing the intended action. Either way, at least one of the popular theses is false. (shrink)

I argue that assertoric content functions as a means for us to track the responsibilities undertaken by communicators, and that distinctively assertoric commitments are distinguished by being generated directly in virtue of the words the speaker uses. This raises two questions: (a) Why are speakers responsible for the content thus generated? (b) Why is it important for us to distinguish between commitments in terms of their manner of generation? I answer the first question by developing a novel (...) responsibility based metasemantics. I answer the second by reference to the conflicting pressures governing the resources we have available for appraising speech. (shrink)

This paper offers a brief survey of the philosophical literature on assertion, presenting each contribution to the RIFL special issue "Assertion and its social significance" within the context of the contemporary debate in which it intervenes. The discussion is organised into three thematic sections. The first one concerns the nature of assertion and its relation with assertoric commitment – the distinctive responsibility that the speaker undertakes in virtue of making a statement. The second section considers the epistemic significance of (...) assertion, exploring the role that assertion plays in the transmission of knowledge, the epistemic constraints that regulate it, and its relation with truth. The third section deals with communicative content that goes beyond what is literally asserted: implicatures, metaphors and expressive meaning. (shrink)

Verbal communication leaves room for interpretative disputes. Speakers can argue about what they mean by their words and negotiate their commitments in conversation. This article examines the deniability of implicitly communicated contents and addresses the question of what makes an act of denial seem more or less plausible to the addressee. I argue that denials bring about a process of reconstruction of the context of interpretation of the speaker's utterance and I illustrate how considerations of cognitive utility are (...) the key determinant for distinguishing plausible from merely possible deniability. (shrink)

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 (...) corresponds to an influential and widely endorsed theory of assertoric content: diagonalism. I begin by arguing that, despite its intuitive appeal, diagonalism should be rejected because it conflicts with our intuitive judgments about the circumstances in which the contents of speakers’ assertions would be true or false. I then show that the failure of diagonalism requires us to either abandon a familiar way of thinking about information and rational assertion or hold that the content of an assertion is not always the information it communicates. I suggest that we choose the latter horn of this dilemma — assertoric content is better characterized in terms of the commitments speakers undertake than in terms of the information they communicate. (shrink)

In a series of articles (Pagin, 2004, 2009), Peter Pagin has argued that assertion is not a social speech act, introducing a method (which we baptize ‘the P-test’) designed to refute any account that defines assertion in terms of its social effects. This paper contends that Pagin's method fails to rebut the thesis that assertion is social. We show that the P-test is both unreliable (because it overgenerates counterexamples) and counterproductive (because it ultimately provides evidence in favor of some social (...) accounts). Nonetheless, we contend that assertion is not fully social. We defend an intermediate view according to which assertion is only a partly social speech act: assertions both commit the speaker to a proposition (a social component) and present their propositional content as true (a non-social component). The upshot is that assertion is in some important respect social, although it cannot be defined solely in terms of its social effects. (shrink)

Recent research has shown that the superlative quantifiers at least and at most do not have the same type of truth conditions as the comparative quantifiers more than and fewer than. We propose that superlative quantifiers are interpreted at the level of speech acts. We relate them to denegations of speech acts, as in I don’t promise to come, which we analyze as excluding the speech act of a promise to come. Calling such conversational acts that affect future permissible speech (...) acts “meta-speech acts,” we introduce the meta-speech act of a GRANT of a proposition as a denial to assert the negation of that proposition. Superlative quantifiers are analyzed as quantifiers over GRANTS. Thus, John petted at least three rabbits means that the minimal number n such that the speaker GRANTs the proposition that John petted n rabbits is n = 3. We formalize this interpretation in terms of commitment states and commitment spaces, and show how the truth conditions that are derived from it are partly entailed and partly conversationally implicated. We demonstrate how the theory accounts for a wide variety of distributional phenomena of superlative quantifiers, including the contexts in which they can be embedded. (shrink)

John MacFarlane defends a radical form of truth relativism that makes the truth of assertions relative not only to contexts of utterance but also to contexts of assessment, or perspectives. Making sense of assessment-sensitive truth is a matter of making sense of the normative commitments undertaken by speakers in using assessment sensitive sentences. This paper argues against the possibility of making sense of such a practice. Evans raised a challenge to the coherence of relative truth. A modification of the (...) challenge can be given against MacFarlane’s revised views on assertion. The main objection to the relativist is that rational and earnest speakers are not bound by assessment-relative standards of correctness. (shrink)

In this paper we analyze and discuss Jennifer Saul’s account of the famous Gricean notions of ‘what is said’ and ‘what is implicated’ and the alleged conflict between them and the so- called Speaker- Meaning Exhaustiveness Thesis (SMET), which is standardly attributed to Grice in the literature. SMET declares that speaker- meaning divides exhaustively into what is said and what is (conventionally or nonconventionally) implicated by the speaker. After a detailed interpretation of Saul’s position, we argue that (...) her analysis partly misconstrues the relation between Grice’s theory of speaker- meaning and his normative account of conversational implicature. First of all, because SMET is not a genuine part of the Gricean theory of language and meaning – Grice was never committed to it. Secondly, Saul’s interpretation of the Gricean account of conversational implicature does not reflect accurately his original ideas. Although we agree with Saul that conversational implicature has an essential normative aspect, her account cannot capture well the real nature of this normativity, since it does not identify its source and does not delineate its scope. Finally, we present an alternative, speaker- oriented normative interpretation of Grice’s account of conversational implicatures, and argue that it fits better with the Gricean picture of communication and handles better the various problematic cases of conversational implicature than Saul’s mainly audience- oriented interpretation. (shrink)

Traditional descriptivism and Kripkean causalism are standardly interpreted as rival theories on a single topic. I argue that there is no such shared topic, i.e. that there is no question that they can be interpreted as giving rival answers to. The only way to make sense of the commitment to epistemic transparency that characterizes traditional descriptivism is to interpret Russell and Frege as proposing rival accounts of how to characterize a subject’s beliefs about what names refer to. My argument relies (...) on a development of the distinction between speaker’s reference and semantic reference. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to examine Mitchell S. Green’s notion of self-expression and the role it plays in his model of illocutionary communication. The paper is organized into three parts. In Section 2, after discussing Green’s notions of illocutionary speaker meaning and self-expression, I consider the contribution that self-expression makes to the mechanisms of intentional communication; in particular, I introduce the notion of proto-illocutionary speaker meaning and argue that it is necessary to account for acts overtly (...) showing general commitments that are not ‘marked’ as being specific to one or another illocutionary force. In Section 3, I focus on Green’s account of expressive norms and argue that their function is to stabilize rather than constitute the structure of illocutionary signaling systems; moreover, I examine critically Green’s idea according to which expressive norms enable us to indicate the force of our speech acts and suggest that they play a key role in the mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Finally, in Section 4, I elaborate on the idea of discourse-constituted thoughts—or, in other words, thoughts that ex- ist in virtue of being expressed in making certain conversation-bound speech acts—and use it to develop a more comprehensive model of the expressive dimension of speech acts. (shrink)

The great challenge of rhetorical argument is to make discourse ethical without making it less logical. This challenge is of central importance throughout the full range of practical argument, and understanding the relation of the ethical to the logical is one of the principal contributions the humanities, in this case the study of rhetoric, can make to legal scholarship. Aristotle’s Rhetoric shows how arguments can be ethical and can create ethical relations between speaker and hearer. I intend to apply (...) Aristotle’s analysis to a phenomenon that did not yet exist for him, that of authority, by asking how the acts of asserting and accepting authority can be ethical acts. I take as a test case a peculiarly unfortunate and inept appeal to authority, that offered by the counsel for the District of Columbia in arguing Bolling v Sharp who cited Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott to clinch his point. By seeing just what goes wrong in such a maladroit appeal, I explore the rational, voluntary and ethical dimensions of a decision to accept a given commitment to authority. I use Joseph Raz’s analysis of authority and the relation of reason to authority, yet think I go beyond Raz by exploring the deliberate and voluntary nature of submission to authority. Choosing to be bound by an authority is an ethical act. As such it is always rational and yet never purely rational. The Supreme Court’s choice of authorities is part of its making itself into an authority, and is a paradigm of the ethical act of choosing to be obligated. Choosing to be committed or obligated is a central paradox of political theory and considerations of authority and obligation, at least since early social contract theorists. However, its importance for judicial reasoning, which at the same time chooses to submit to authority and itself becomes an authority, has not been noted. Consideration of the relations between the ethical and the logical can help us better to articulate the constitution of ethical authority. (shrink)

This paper highlights the fundamental difference in the criteria adopted to explain original intentionality, which is the basic stratum of intentional phenomena, between the mentalist mainstream and the minority inspired by the rejection of the Myth of the Given. Among the attempts on the latter, inferentialism has become a view of particular interest. According to inferentialism, full intentionality is a feature of cognitive subjects who participate in normative discursive practice. Therefore, the criteria to which the basic intentionality of the mind (...) can be attributed are fundamentally linguistic and not mentalist; for example, perception alone is not sufficient to ground full intentional states. This situation is an interesting challenge to mainstream intentionalism. Furthermore, it can be argued that this view can be a good basis to develop a different conception of collective intentionality in social ontology. In fact, inferentialism makes use of the basic normative notion of discursive commitment to track and evaluate the inferential moves of speakers. This notion can be easily extended hypothetically in the direction of the idea of a ‘joint commitment’ developed by Margaret Gilbert. In what follows, a number of questions and remarks are raised as a first explorative attempt. The role that language plays in social ontology through this approach is of particular interest because of its strict connection with collective intentionality: it is an ‘active’ institution (maybe a meta-institution), the medium and the practice to create and establish other institutions. (shrink)

In their book Commitment in Dialogue, Walton and Krabbe claim that formal dialogue systems for conversational argumentation are “not very realistic and not easy to apply”. This difficulty may make argumentation theory less well adapted to be employed to describe or analyse actual argumentation practice. On the other hand, the empirical study of real-life arguments may miss or ignore insights of more than the two millennia of the development of philosophy of language, rhetoric, and argumentation theory. In this paper, we (...) propose a novel methodology for adapting such theories to serve as applicable tools in the study of argumentation phenomena. Our approach is both theoretically-informed and empirically-grounded in large-scale corpus analysis. The area of interest are appeals to ethos, the character of the speaker, building upon Aristotle’s rhetoric. Ethotic techniques are used to influence the hearers through the communication, where speakers might establish, but also emphasise, weaken or undermine their own or others’ credibility and trustworthiness. Specifically, we apply our method to Aristotelian theory of ethos elements which identifies practical wisdom, moral virtue and goodwill as components of speakers’ character, which can be supported or attacked. The challenges we identified in this case and the solutions we proposed allow us to formulate general guidelines of how to exploit rich theoretical frameworks to the analysis of the practice of language use. (shrink)

In articles such as “Speech Acts without Propositions?” (2006), Marina Sbisà advocates a “strong” conception of speech acts as means by which speakers modify their own and others’ deontic statuses, including their rights, obligations, and commitments. On this basis Sbisà challenges an influential approach to speech acts as typically if not universally possessing propositional contents. Sbisà argues that such an approach leads to viewing speech acts as primarily aimed at communicating propositional attitudes rather than carrying out socially and normatively (...) significant action. For this reason she advocates eschewing propositions from speech act theory’s conceptual toolkit; she also proposes a liberalization of the distinction between illocutionary force and semantic content, which are widely thought to be mutually exclusive. In this chapter we examine Sbisà’s reasoning and argue that while it does justify denying propositional attitudes a central role in communication, it does not justify dispensing with propositions or other contents in our theorizing about speech acts. In addition, we endorse Sbisà’s proposal for liberalizing the force/content distinction, and show a variety of ways in which force indicators may also possess semantic content. (shrink)

Inventions of Teaching: A Genealogy is a powerful examination of current metaphors for and synonyms of teaching. It offers an account of the varied and conflicting influences and conceptual commitments that have contributed to contemporary vocabularies--and that are in some ways maintained by those vocabularies, in spite of inconsistencies and incompatibilities among popular terms. The concern that frames the book is how speakers of English invented (in the original sense of the word, "came upon") our current vocabularies for teaching. (...) Conceptually, this book is unique in the educational literature. As a whole, it presents an overview of the major underlying philosophical and ideological concepts and traditions related to knowledge, learning, and teaching in the Western world, concisely introducing readers to the central historical and contemporary discourses that shape current discussions and beliefs in the field. Because the organization of historical, philosophical, theoretical, and etymological information is around key conceptual divergences in Western thought rather than any sort of chronology, this text is not a linear history, but several histories--or, more precisely, it is a genealogy. Specifically, it is developed around breaks in opinion that gave or are giving rise to diverse interpretations of knowledge, learning, and teaching--highlighting historical moments in which vibrant new figurative understandings of teaching emerged and moments at which they froze into literalness. The book is composed of two sorts of chapters, "branching" and "teaching." Branching chapters include an opening treatment of the break in opinion, separate discussions of each branch, and a summary of the common assumptions and shared histories of the two branches. Teaching chapters offer brief etymological histories and some of the practical implications of the terms for teaching that were coined, co-opted, or redefined within the various traditions. Inventions of Teaching: A Genealogy is an essential text for senior undergraduate and graduate courses in curriculum studies and foundations of teaching and is highly relevant as well for students, faculty, and researchers across the field of education. (shrink)