Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Some writers (e.g., Alston (2000, 116-120); Jary (2010, 15-16); Pagin’s (2011, 123)) defend accounts of assertion that imply that this act cannot be indirectly made, by requiring that an assertion consists of the communication of the proposition p by means of a sentence that means p. I think that this incorrectly makes it definitionally impossible to make assertions of p with sentences that mean something else (or even with fully non-linguistic means). However, in (say) asking ‘Who the heck wants to read this book?’, I am intuitively asserting that (to put it mildly) nobody wants to read it. Aside from direct counterexamples like this, we might ask: why would assertion be special, in that it is the only speech act that cannot be made indirectly? Recently, however, other writers have advanced arguments that would provide an answer to this question, and hence would support views of assertion along the indicated lines. While Camp (2006) and Lepore and Stone (2010) have discussed the arguments for specific cases, such as metaphorical assertions, Green (2015), Fricker (2012) and Lepore and Stone (2015) provide more general considerations. One is based on the lying/misleading distinction: if assertions could be done indirectly, we could not properly distinguish lying from merely misleading. The second is epistemic: indirectly conveyed claims would be too ambiguous for the speaker to fully commit to them in the way constitutive of assertions. The goal of this paper is to critically examine these arguments, aiming to establish that assertions can be indirectly made.