Assertion

A (partly) social speech act

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3394445
AutoresNeri Marsili (0000-0001-7853-7359, Universitat de Barcelona, autor de correspondencia), Mitchell Green (0000-0001-9113-3455, University of Connecticut)
Año2021
Volumen181
Páginas17-28
Fecha de publicación2021-08-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Pragmatics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0378-2166 • E-ISSN: 1879-1387
EditorialElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.pragma.2021.03.016
OpenAlexW3169488276
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas12
Referencias citadas43

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

Assertion · Commit · Component (thermodynamics · Counterexample · Linguistics · Political science · Proposition · Social change · Social heuristics · Speech act · Utterance · Computer Science · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology