Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

In this talk, I will consider the role of the notion of assertion in theories aimed at explaining the human capacity for linguistic communication. It has been widely assumed that such theories need to posit a level of representation that expresses assertoric content, leading to notions such as ‘explicature’. I will suggest that such notions are in fact redundant in the theories that posit them, and that identifying the truth-conditions of an utterance should not be considered a goal of basic processes of utterance interpretation. Rather, I will suggest, the goal of these processes is to identify the situation that the utterance denotes, and the issue of truth-conditional content only arises when we take a reflective, meta-communicative stance towards the utterance.