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 they 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 article considers the linguistic and normative issues side by side. It aims to bring some order and clarity to thinking about hedging, so as to illuminate aspects of interest to both linguists and philosophers. In particular, it considers 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?
Probabilistic semantics for epistemic modals: Normality assumptions, conditional epistemic spaces and the strength of must and might
