Abstract
Assertion and denial are speech acts that play a central role in different theories of meaning, but the proper way to understand their relation remains an object of debate. We set out to identify the source of this disagreement and compare the proposals made by different theories of meaning. We also defend a unilateralist understanding of the relation between assertion and denial, according to which denying a sentence means that its assertion conditions could never be satisfied.
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Notes
- 1.
We could also consider a third way of understanding the relation between assertion and denial, where denial has priority over assertion. This approach is called falsificationism and a recent defense is provided by Kapsner (2014). Thus, a full defense of unilateralism would not only need to consider the need of a relation between assertion and denial, but also the direction of such a relation (that is, whether assertion has priority over denial or if it is the other way around). In the present work, I only discuss the first point.
- 2.
It is worth noticing that a sentence might be presently undecided, without it being the case that its assertion and denial conditions could never be satisfied. For instance, S could be a mathematical claim that is presently undecided. This only means that its assertion and denial conditions are not presently satisfied. If someone came up with a proof or a refutation in the future, those conditions could be satisfied. Unilateralism is compatible with the existence of this kind of sentences. On the other hand, unilateralism rules out the existence of sentences such that its assertion and denial conditions could never be satisfied.
- 3.
It is known that these coordination principles raise difficulties for the bilateralist. Ferreira (2008) showed that assuming coordination for atomic formulae is insufficient to preserve (C2) at the molecular level. This result proves that coordination principles and the bilateral introduction and elimination rules for the logical connectives cannot rule out a failure of coordination for complex formulas, even when coordination of assertion and denial is assumed for atomic formulas. See Rumfitt (2008) for a reply.
- 4.
For a criticism of bilateralism aimed specifically at Rumfitt’s proposal, see Dickie (2010).
- 5.
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Acknowledgements
This work was funded by the post-doctoral scholarship SFRH/BPD/117034/2016 of the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia.
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Santos, G. (2021). In Defense of Unilateralism. In: Lopez-Soto, T. (eds) Dialog Systems. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61438-6_4
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