Can Groups Assert That P?

2019 ◽  
pp. 326-344
Author(s):  
Deborah Tollefsen
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Constitutive Rule ◽  
The Past ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Common ◽  
Declarative Statement ◽  
John Macfarlane

When a group or institution issues a declarative statement, what sort of speech act is this? Is it the assertion of a single individual (perhaps the group’s spokesperson or leader) or the assertion of all or most of the group members? Or is there a sense in which the group itself asserts that p? If assertion is a speech act, then who is the actor in the case of group assertion? These are the questions this chapter aims to address. Whether groups themselves can make assertions or whether a group of individuals can jointly assert that p depends, in part, on what sort of speech act assertion is. The literature on assertion has burgeoned over the past few years, and there is a great deal of debate regarding the nature of assertion. John MacFarlane has helpfully identified four theories of assertion. Following Sandy Goldberg, we can call these the attitudinal account, the constitutive rule account, the common-ground account, and the commitment account. I shall consider what group assertion might look like under each of these accounts and doing so will help us to examine some of the accounts of group assertion (often presented as theories of group testimony) on offer. I shall argue that, of the four accounts, the commitment account can best be extended to make sense of group assertion in all its various forms.

Assertion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guiming Yang ◽  
Sanford C. Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Great Length ◽  
Lottery Ticket ◽  
Constitutive Rule ◽  
Explicit Content ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One

In the past two to three decades, most of the philosophical attention that has been paid to the speech act of assertion aims to characterize the nature of the act. A first question that is pursued concerns where the speech act of assertion fits within the domain of assertives (the category speech acts in which a proposition is presented-as-true). Simply put, assertions are those assertive speech acts in which the speaker advances a claim. But what is it to perform this sort of speech act? What is the nature of the act? Philosophers have proposed six main answers. These include the attitude view (which characterizes the nature of the act in terms of its role in expressing belief), the grammatical view (on which assertion is picked out by the vehicles used to make acts of this kind, namely, declarative sentences), the common ground view (where assertion is understood in terms of its essential effect on a conversation’s common ground), the commitment view (where assertion is characterized in terms of the kind of commitment that is engendered or reconfirmed by the performance of acts of this type), the constitutive rule view (according to which assertions are individuated by the distinctive rule that governs acts of this type) and the no-assertion view (which holds that there is no unique, interesting speech act type picked out by ‘assertion’). Of these six views, the one that has received the most attention (both critical and supportive) is the constitutive rule view. Such a view has been developed (and criticized) at great length. A leading version of the constitutive rule view is the view that the rule in question requires that one assert only what one knows. The main considerations offered in defense of this version of the view include its role in explaining various features of our assertoric practice, including the paradoxicality of assertions of sentences of the form ‘p, but I do not know that p’, its role in explaining why propositions expressed with, for example, ‘My lottery ticket lost’ are not properly assertable on merely probabilistic grounds (even when the odds of one’s winning are arbitrarily small) and its role in explaining why ‘How do you know?’ is a proper response to an assertion (even when the assertion’s explicit content has nothing to do with the speaker’s knowledge). However, many authors have responded to these arguments for the knowledge rule, finding them unconvincing. Interestingly, a great amount of attention has also been devoted to forging connections between the speech act of assertion and a variety of other topics of philosophical interest. These include topics in philosophy of language (pragmatics, semantics), epistemology (the epistemology of testimony, the epistemology of disagreement, the nature of epistemic authority, the division of epistemic labor), metaphysics (the nature of future contingents, modality), ethics (the ethics of assertion; what we owe to each other as information-sharing creatures) and social and political philosophy (various forms of epistemic injustice, silencing).

On the Performative Use of the Past Participle in German

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 335-419
Author(s):  
Bjarne Ørsnes
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Syntactic Analysis ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Functional Grammar ◽  
Lexical Functional Grammar ◽  
The Past ◽  
Pragmatic Analysis ◽  
Root Position ◽  
The Common

In German, past participles not only occur in root position with a directive force, as in Stillgestanden! ‘Stop!’ lit. ‘stood still(ptcp)’, but also as performatives in responses: A: Du sagst also nichts zu Papi. ‘So you won’t tell dad.’ B: Versprochen! ‘I promise!’ lit. ‘promised(ptcp)’. Here B performs the speech act denoted by the verb by saying that it has been performed. The propositional argument of the participle (what is promised) is resolved contextually, and the agent and the recipient arguments are restricted to the speaker and the hearer, respectively. This article presents a syntactic analysis of this rarely studied phenomenon, arguing that the construction with a performative participle is not ellipsis but an IP with a participial head and null pronominal complements. The syntactic analysis is formalized within Lexical-Functional Grammar. A pragmatic analysis is proposed arguing that the performative participle in its core use alternates with Yes! to express agreement with an assertion or compliance with a request, that is, to express consent to the effect that a proposition p may safely be added to the Common Ground. This analysis is cast within the dialogue framework of Farkas & Bruce (2010) and extended to response performative participles in monological uses.*

Introduction: Rethinking Blackness and Indigeneity in the Light of Settler Colonial Theory

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Circe Sturm
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Land Dispossession ◽  
Colonial Theory ◽  
The Common ◽  
Theories Of Sovereignty

Racial analytics in the field, particularly those associated with theories of sovereignty and settler colonialism, have tended to obscure the common ground of Afro-descendant and Indigenous experience, such as land dispossession, political marginalization, and a shared desire for sovereignty and self-determination. In the wake of this analytic divide, even less attention is given to how blackness specifically structures or delimits Indigenous life, as blackness and indigeneity are often taken to be competing identities that cannot exist within the same individuals and communities without friction. This volume seeks to take the next step in pushing forward our theoretical conversations about blackness and indigeneity. Rather than assuming that anti-Black racism, as well as that directed against Indigenous people, are problems of the past or irrelevant to contemporary Indigenous political status, this volume engages with both critical race theory and settler colonial theory to explore how blackness intersects with Indigenous sovereignty, authority, identity, and lived experience.

scholarly journals Computing the meaning of the assertive speech act by a software agent

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Brian Nolan
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Software Agent ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Illocutionary Force ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Situation Type ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Relationship

This paper examines the nature of the assertive speech act of Irish. We examine the syntactical constructional form of the assertive to identify its constructional signature. We consider the speech act as a construction whose meaning as an utterance depends on the framing situation and context, along with the common ground of the interlocutors. We identify how the assertive speech act is formalised to make it computer tractable for a software agent to compute its meaning, taking into account the contribution of situation, context and a dynamic common ground. Belief, desire and intention play a role in <em>what is meant</em> as against <em>what is said</em>. The nature of knowledge, and how it informs common ground, is explored along with the relationship between knowledge and language. Computing the meaning of a speech act in the situation requires us to consider the level of the interaction of all these dimensions. We argue that the contribution of lexicon and grammar, with the recognition of belief, desire and intentions in the situation type and associated illocutionary force, sociocultural conventions of the interlocutors along with their respective general and cultural knowledge, their common ground and other sources of contextual information are all important for representing meaning in communication. We show that the influence of the situation, context and common ground feeds into the utterance meaning derivation. The ‘<em>what is said’</em> is reflected in the event and its semantics, while the ‘<em>what is meant’</em> is derived at a higher level of abstraction within a situation.

scholarly journals Technopoïesis: Transmedia Mythologisation and the Unity of Knowedge

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asunción López-Varela Azcárate ◽  
Henry Sussman
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Cultural Representation ◽  
Human Thought ◽  
The Past ◽  
Emerging Media ◽  
Strategic Narratives ◽  
Production Distribution ◽  
The Common

It is difficult to explain why different disciplines are drawn to similar problems. Inter-relations are not always explainable by direct influence. It has been argued that any common ground derives from the fact that people share certain kinds of everyday experiences. Is ‘consilience’ or the unification of knowledge a utopia or a possibility, as William Whewell Edward Wilson would have it? This thematic issue of Icono14 explores the common premise underlying all human disciplines: the confirmation that technology has a direct impact upon sign production, distribution and reception and, thus, upon the entire system of human thought, cultural representation and cognition. The collection examines transmedial representations of technological advance by looking at their mythical shades of meanings as strategic narratives. As practical knowledge engaged in the creation and use of tools and machines as well as in the development of techniques and methods of organization that perform specific functions in making human life easier, the technologies of the past can shed some light on the future that emerging media can bring about for human groups.

scholarly journals Why Walking the Common is more than a Walk in the Park

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nike Romano ◽  
Veronica Mitchell ◽  
Vivienne Bozaleck
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Theoretical Orientation ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
Coffee Shop ◽  
The Past ◽  
Heritage Site ◽  
National Heritage ◽  
The Common ◽  
South African Higher Education

For the past few years, as concerned academics and educators in South African higher education, we have come together to meet/think/drink coffee/eat/discuss our research and teaching practices in a coffee shop that overlooks the Rondebosch Common, a public space and national heritage site. The Common invited us to take our thoughts for a walk and we embarked on numerous walking encounters that affected and troubled us in many ways. Our walks became research-creation events that surfaced the implicatedness of our white settler privilege. As we grappled with the complexities and ambivalences grounded in our relationality with this contested site, we were prompted to explore hauntology as a theoretical orientation for our pedagogical practices. Walking with/through the demarcated land that is surrounded by privilege in terms of buildings, services and residences enacted and materialised entanglements of the past/present/future histories. We felt an exchange of affect between those present, the ghosts of colonial and apartheid histories, and the implications for our ongoing teaching. Following Haraway's (2016) ‘staying with the trouble’ and Tsing et al.'s (2017) ‘how to live on a damaged planet’, the relationships between human and non-human continue to haunt us, as we grapple with the im/possibility of finding common ground in a country devastated by colonial and apartheid violences.

scholarly journals New Heathenry between past and present. The case of Ásatrúfélagið and Samfundet Forn Sed

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
Irina Manea
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The Past ◽  
Alternative Spirituality ◽  
The Common ◽  
Public Message ◽  
Heritage Discourse

As a variant of alternative spirituality derived from postmodern fluidity and fragmentation of large narratives, Nordic Heathenry has gone through a revival for the past decades. Due to the common ground of potentially völkish/ethnicist views shared by far-right milieus, it has been confronted with the risk of the extremist framework dominating the reception of Norse symbols and myths. While many strains of heathenry might present similarities in their neo-romantic nativist revival, some have been attempting to focus on a heritage discourse that can become acceptable and normalized in society, reflecting an open and inclusive attitude. The Asatru Association in Iceland and The Old Way in Sweden, through their public message and stated mission, underline the need for the freedom to reinvent myth and ritual while remaining anchored in the present, thus distancing themselves from other cultural appropriations and proclaiming their own role in society. The very flexible view on myth and ritual constitutes a defining aspect for the identity of these movements.

scholarly journals The Epileptogenic Zone: Concept and Definition

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Jehi
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Focal Epilepsy ◽  
Epileptogenic Zone ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Drug Resistant ◽  
The Past ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Specific Definition ◽  
The Ideal

A “concept” refers to what exists in the mind as a representation (as in something comprehended) or as a formulation (as in a plan). It is generally understood as “any idea of what a thing ought to be” (Merriam-Webster). From that premise, an “idea” cannot be compartmentalized or rigidly defined as exclusively belonging to any single individual or school of thought. The utility of a concept is inherently linked to its adaptability to the needs and conditions of the time. I state this upfront because over the past several decades, the concept of the epileptogenic zone (EZ) has become so crucial to the foundation of major schools of surgical epilepsy that discussions and opinions on the topic have essentially sought to legitimize one view while criticizing the other. This review is not a referendum on any specific definition of the EZ but rather a chronological analysis of the historical evolution of this concept and the invasive EEG tools used to study it. The goal is to highlight common ground necessary to tackle the ever-present challenge of defining the ideal resection for a patient with drug-resistant focal epilepsy.

Circles, Trees, and Bears: Symbols of Power of the Weenuche Ute

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-130
Author(s):  
Robert McPherson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Great Basin ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Indian Culture ◽  
Cultural Survival ◽  
Ghost Dance ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Information ◽  
The Common

The Ute community of White Mesa, comprised of approximately 315 people, sits in the corner of southeastern Utah, eleven miles outside of Blanding. The residents, primarily of Weenuche Ute and Paiute ancestry, enjoy a cultural heritage that embraces elements from plains, mountain, and desert/Great Basin Indian culture. Among their religious practices are the Worship Dance, Ghost Dance, Sun Dance, and Bear Dance. Although each ceremony is unique, and performed for a variety of reasons, the common ground among them cannot be missed. Healing the sick, renewing necessities for survival, connecting spiritually with ancestors, communicating with the Land Beyond, establishing patterns for life, and sharing symbols that unify religious expression—such as the circle, tree, and bear—are elements that characterize the faith of these people as expressed in these ceremonies. Their origin sheds light on the relevance of these practices as they blend traditions from the past with contemporary usage. As symbols imbued with religious relevance, they make the intangible visible while continuing to teach and protect that which is important in Ute cultural survival. This article looks at these shared elements while offering new information about the origin and symbolism of the Ghost Dance as practiced in the Worship Dance. Circles, trees, bears, and other emblems provide not only themes from past teaching but empower the Ute universe today.

Assertion Norms

2020 ◽  
pp. 131-170
Author(s):  
Jody Azzouni
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Knowledge Norm ◽  
The Common ◽  
Cartoon Characters

Assertion is a phenomenological category—that is, assertions are experienced as such by speaker-hearers. Speech-act phenomenology is distinguished from semantic perception. We not only experience speech acts, we experience the words and sentences we utter as distinct objects with properties different from those of the speech acts. Using this distinction, evidence against agential-state assertion norms, such as a sincere-belief norm, a knowledge norm, or a warrant norm, etc., is given. Anonymous assertions or shapes resembling inscriptions produced by accident are experienced as assertions and as possessing meaning even when they are recognized to be products of sheer accidents and in reality without utterers. Spokespersons for companies, actors in advertisements for products, cartoon characters (that don’t exist), and flakes who can’t be trusted are all experienced nevertheless as asserting, and what they assert as assertions. The common-ground expectation view is supported. Compatibly with this, Moorean remarks are often naturally utterable.

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