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).

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 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.

scholarly journals Deconstructing Questions: Reanalyzing a heterogenous class of speech acts via commitment and engagement

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-82
Author(s):  
Johannes M. Heim ◽  
Martina E. Wiltschko
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Direct Link ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Syntactic Form ◽  
Pragmatic Function ◽  
The Common

Direct and indirect characterizations of the relation between clause type (syntactic form) and speech act (pragmatic function) are problematic because they map oversimplified forms onto decomposable functions. We propose an alternative account of questions by abandoning any (in)direct link to their clause type and by decomposing speech acts into two variables encoding propositional attitudes. One variable captures the speaker’s commitment to an utterance, another their expectation toward the addressee’s engagement. We couch this proposal in a syntactic framework that relies on two projections dedicated to managing common ground (GroundP) and managing turn-taking (ResponseP), respectively. Empirical evidence comes from the conversational properties of sentence-final intonation in English and sentence-peripheral particles that serve to manage the common ground.

Lying and Fiction

2018 ◽  
pp. 302-314
Author(s):  
Emar Maier
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Semantic Framework ◽  
Pragmatic Analysis ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Common ◽  
Maxim Of Quality

Lying and fiction both involve the deliberate production of statements that fail to obey Grice’s first Maxim of Quality (“do not say what you believe to be false”). The question thus arises if we can provide a uniform analysis for fiction and lies. This chapter discusses the similarities, but also some fundamental differences between lying and fiction. It argues that there is little hope for a satisfying account within a traditional truth-conditional semantic framework. Rather than immediately moving to a fully pragmatic analysis involving distinct speech acts of fiction-making and lying, the chapter first explores how far we get with the assumption that both are simply assertions, analyzed in a Stalnakerian framework, i.e., as proposals to update the common ground.

Fielding and Richardson

PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (5) ◽  
pp. 381-388
Author(s):  
William Park
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
General Type ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One

But the Discovery [of when to laugh and when to cry] was reserved for this Age, and there are two Authors now living in this Metropolis, who have found out the Art, and both brother Biographers, the one of Tom Jones, and the other of Clarissa.author of Charlotte SummersRather than discuss the differences which separate Fielding and Richardson, I propose to survey the common ground which they share with each other and with other novelists of the 1740's and 50's. In other words I am suggesting that these two masters, their contemporaries, and followers have made use of the same materials and that as a result the English novels of the mid-eighteenth century may be regarded as a distinct historic version of a general type of literature. Most readers, it seems to me, do not make this distinction. They either think that the novel is always the same, or they believe that one particular group of novels, such as those written in the early twentieth century, is the form itself. In my opinion, however, we should think of the novel as we do of the drama. No one kind of drama, such as Elizabethan comedy or Restoration comedy, is the drama itself; instead, each is a particular manifestation of the general type. Each kind bears some relationship to the others, but at the same time each has its own identity, which we usually call its conventions. By conventions I mean not only stock characters, situations, and themes, but also notions and assumptions about the novel, human nature, society, and the cosmos itself. If we compare one kind of novel to another without first considering the conventions of each, we are likely to make the same mistake that Thomas Rymer did when he blamed Shakespeare for not conforming to the canons of classical French drama.

Speech Acts and Performatives

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Hornsby
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Philosophical Writing ◽  
Illocutionary Acts

This article aims to connect Austin's seminal notion of a speech act with developments in philosophy of language over the last forty odd years. It starts by considering how speech acts might be conceived in Austin's general theory. Then it turns to the illocutionary acts with which much philosophical writing on speech acts has been concerned, and finally to the performatives which Austin's own treatment of speech as action took off from.

Speech acts and conversational sequencing

1994 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Brassac
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Conversational Analysis ◽  
Conversational Interactions ◽  
The One

The question of the use of speech act theory in accounting for conversational sequencing is discussed from the point of view of the explanation of linguistic interaction. On the one hand, this question lies at the heart of the opposition between conversational analysis and discourse analysis. On the other, it dominates the discussion around a text by Searle called "Conversation". After summarizing what is at stake in the debate, I focus on the positions of two authors, Dascal and Van Rees, who favor the idea of a possible (and necessary) combination of illocutionary logic and the analysis of conversational interactions. My own position consists in taking into account the new elements that have recently enriched illocutionary logic (particularly the integration of perlocution through the notion of satisfaction conditions) within the framework of an essentially dialogical position. The proposed approach is in agreement with the theses of these two authors and complements them with elements that satisfy their demands.

scholarly journals Transformando sofrimento em narrativa e narrativa em uma nova vida / Transforming Suffering into Storytelling and Storytelling into a New Life

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatiana Piccardi
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Medical Science ◽  
Sex Reassignment Surgery ◽  
Sex Reassignment ◽  
Science Study ◽  
Internal Resources ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The One ◽  
The University

ABSTRACTThrough the analysis of narratives on sorrow and pain, this paper attempts to verify the extent to which speakers seem to find relief and internal resources to rebuild their lives within their own processes of narration. The proposed reflections derive from two correlated experiences: (i) observing speeches of parents belonging to a group that supports grieving parents. These speeches led to a favorable mourning development; and (ii) the fact that the researcher had the opportunity to act as a ghostwriter of an unusual story: the one involving a transsexual who decided to undergo sex reassignment surgery and write about the experience to transform her pain into narrative. In both cases, the narratives seem to have been critical to transform their lives. In both cases, the empathy of the interlocutor(s) was fundamental to promote what I freely call “curative effects”. The starting point is the perception that each speech act can be understood in its wealth only within the broader context of its production. This includes checking – for the case of the fragments presented – the appearance of discourses about illness, death, loss, sexuality, which permeate our culture and get materialized into the speeches of the interlocutors. It is understood that curative effects as well as identity empowerment cannot be explained solely through the narrativization of personal stories about sorrow and pain, but it is equally understood that one needs a widely-held comprehension about the language movement that is enabled in those specific situations as to evaluate how language can be optimized in similar processes where transforming pain into narrative can be a matter of survival. My conclusion makes a few considerations on how these narratives can be deemed speech acts with curative effects that can promote life and reconstruct identities and how they act independently within the enunciative process. Austin’s (1975) speech act theory is the main theoretical prospect adopted, in a combination with recent debates about identity and reflections over the relations involving language, literature, narrative, and health promoted by GENAM, the Narrative and Medical Science Study Group of the University of São Paulo, Brazil.RESUMOEste trabalho busca verificar, por meio da análise de narrativas sobre dor e sofrimento, em que medida os respectivos enunciadores parecem encontrar alívio e recursos internos para refazer suas vidas por meio do próprio processo de narrar. As reflexões propostas são desdobramento de duas experiências correlatas: (i) a observação das falas das mães/pais pertencentes a um grupo de apoio a pais enlutados; falas tais que promoveram um desenvolvimento favorável do luto; e (ii) o fato de esta pesquisadora ter tido a oportunidade de ser a ghostwriter de uma história incomum: a de um transexual que decidiu realizar a cirurgia para mudança de sexo e resolveu escrever sobre sua experiência de modo a transformar sua dor em narrativa. Nos dois casos as narrativas parecem ter sido decisivas para transformar vidas. Nos dois casos, a empatia do(s) interlocutor(es) foi fundamental para que se promovessem o que chamo livremente de efeitos curativos. Parte-se da compreensão de que cada ato de fala pode ser entendido em sua riqueza apenas se inserido no contexto mais amplo de sua produção, o que compreende verificar, no caso dos fragmentos apresentados, a emergência de discursos sobre doença, morte, perda, sexualidade, que atravessam nossa cultura e se materializam nas falas dos interlocutores. Entende-se que os efeitos curativos e o empoderamento identitário não podem ser explicados unicamente através da narrativização das histórias pessoais de dor e sofrimento, mas igualmente entende-se que é preciso compreender melhor o movimento de linguagem que é acionado nessas situações específicas, para que se avalie como se pode otimizar a linguagem em processos semelhantes, em que transformar uma dor em narrativa pode ser condição de sobrevivência. Concluo com algumas considerações a respeito do quanto tais narrativas podem ser consideradas atos de fala com efeitos curativos capazes de promover vida e reconstruir identidades e o quanto atuam independentemente no processo de enunciação. A principal perspectiva teórica adotada é a teoria dos atos de fala de Austin (1975), combinada com debates recentes sobre identidade, e reflexões sobre as relações entre linguagem, literatura, narrativa e saúde promovidas pelo GENAM.

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.

Echoicity and contrast in Spanish conditionals

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 601-635
Author(s):  
Elena Castroviejo ◽  
Laia Mayol
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Simple Analysis ◽  
Contrastive Topic ◽  
Pragmatic Function ◽  
Pragmatic Reasoning ◽  
Question Under Discussion ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One ◽  
Joint Occurrence

Abstract This paper is concerned with a conditional construction in Spanish, which we call echoic contrastive conditional, ecc for short. In eccs, the consequent is entailed, the antecedent echoes the content of a previous assertion, and both antecedent and consequent are marked with a Contrastive Topic. Our goal is to fit these properties in a formal explanation compatible with a simple analysis of conditionals. We claim that eccs are a subtype of biscuit conditional, in that antecedent and consequent are independent (i.e. do not express a hypothetical relation). Additionally, we assume that pragmatic reasoning has to explain why a conditional is used to express an adversative relation between the two clauses. First, a proposition that has already been proposed to increase the Common Ground is placed in the antecedent of a conditional in which there is no hypothetical relation between p and q. Thus, the addressee needs to reason as to the pragmatic function the speaker wants to achieve. Second, the Contrastive Topic marking signals that both conjuncts are answers to a multiple wh-question, proposed by the speaker as the current Question Under Discussion (QUD). Third, the answer provided by the second conjunct is a stronger argument for the speaker’s communicative goal than the one provided by the first conjunct. The joint occurrence of echoicity, lack of dependence and Contrastive Topic marking leads to an adversative rhetorical relation between the conjuncts.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document