Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

I'll present the main ideas in my forthcoming book Tell Me What You Know (OUP). The book develops ideas presented in a 2004 paper, “Assertion and the Semantics of Force-Markers”, in C. Bianchi (ed.), The Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction, CSLI Lecture Notes, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 133-166. It elaborates and modifies some ideas in Tim Williamson's 1996 deservedly influential account of assertion. Williamson offers a way of understanding constitutive rules accounts of speech acts free of manifest problems in the original accounts by Austin and Searle, but there are aspects of his account that are not sufficiently developed, and others that I find questionable. He offers his account for "flat out" or "outright" assertion, without elaborating on what this is. I argue that it is a specific default for what is conventionally done by uttering sentences in the declarative mood. He argues that acts defined by constitutive rules cannot be conventional, thereby rejecting one of Austin's main tenets. Although I agree with him that flat out assertion is not conventional in the most relevant sense here, I offer alternative reasons; Williamson's, I argue, is based on an understanding of acts defined by constitutive rules inadequate for this debate, which ignores that the relevant constitutive rules should be in force, and conventions are a valid way to enforce them albeit not the only one. I argue that, while Williamson's knowledge norm is adequate for individual acts like outright belief, it is inadequate for what I take to be a social act like flat out assertion, and I offer as an alternative a knowledge-provision norm. Finally, I argue that flat out assertion can also be done indirectly, for instance through conversational implicatures.