Assertion

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021)
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Abstract

Asserting is the act of claiming that something is the case—for instance, that oranges are citruses, or that there is a traffic congestion on Brooklyn Bridge (at some time). We make assertions to share information, coordinate our actions, defend arguments, and communicate our beliefs and desires. Because of its central role in communication, assertion has been investigated in several disciplines. Linguists, philosophers of language, and logicians rely heavily on the notion of assertion in theorizing about meaning, truth and inference. The nature of assertion and its relation to other speech acts and linguistic phenomena (implicatures, presuppositions, etc.) have been subject to much controversy. This entry will situate assertion within speech act theory and pragmatics more generally, and then go on to present the current main accounts of assertion.

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original Pagin, Peter (2015) "Assertion".

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Author Profiles

Peter Pagin
Stockholm University
Neri Marsili
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

Citations of this work

The definition of assertion: Commitment and truth.Neri Marsili - 2024 - Mind and Language 39 (4):540-560.
Objects and Attitudes.Friederike Moltmann - 2024 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Fictions that Purport to Tell the Truth.Neri Marsili - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (2):509-531.
Fictions that don’t tell the truth.Neri Marsili - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (5):1025-1046.
Towards a Unified Theory of Illocutionary Normativity.Neri Marsili - 2023 - In Laura Caponetto & Paolo Labinaz, Sbisà on Speech as Action. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 2147483647-2147483647.

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References found in this work

Demonstratives: An Essay on the Semantics, Logic, Metaphysics and Epistemology of Demonstratives and other Indexicals.David Kaplan - 1989 - In Joseph Almog, John Perry & Howard Wettstein, Themes From Kaplan. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 481-563.
Studies in the way of words.Herbert Paul Grice - 1989 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Truth and objectivity.Crispin Wright - 1992 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Meaning.Herbert Paul Grice - 1957 - Philosophical Review 66 (3):377-388.

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